Day of the Dead

Posted: October 29, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

This Thursday is Nov. 1st, Day of the Dead, and also time for the next Lambda Lounge meeting.

The first talk will be Alex Miller talking about Rich Hickey’s new Codeq project, which pulls Git repos into Datomic, and extends resolution down to the code level unit (a “codeq”), to allow you to query within and across code repos in terms of your actual programs.

The second talk will be Bill Burdick who talked several months ago about programming with lambda calculus. Bill is returning to talk about continuing progress on his (lazy, functional, untyped) Leisure language and environment, which he previewed last time.

This month’s pizza sponsor is Softtek Integration Systems.

October meeting – logic and Mithril

Posted: October 1, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

We’ve got two great talks set up for the October meeting this week.

Jim Duey is going to be talking about his work parallelizing core.logic (the system David Nolen built from Byrd/Friedman’s miniKanren). If you’re interested in learning about how core.logic was built, check out this video from David’s overview at Strange Loop:

Also, Richard Feldman is going to be talking about a language called Mithril that he’s been working on, a so-called “Greatest Hits of Dynamic Programming” language.

Our pizza sponsor is Strategic Staffing Solutions.

Objective-C collections and language usability

Posted: September 4, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

September is upon us and it’s time for Lambda Lounge this Thursday Sept 6th at 6 pm! 

Heath Borders will be talking about his Objective-C collection library HBCollections and Andreas Stefik, a local professor, will talk about his research and studies on the usability of various programming languages.

Pizza will be provided by NetEffects.

Haskell in August

Posted: August 1, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

Hard to believe we’re in August already but this month’s Lambda Lounge has two Haskell related talks:

  • Asteroids! A Computational Physics Project Ported from Fortran to Haskell – Scott Bale
  • Delimited Continuations and Haskell – Deech

I don’t think I could describe the first talk better than to provide you a description from Scott himself:

First, I expect this presentation to have *zero* practical value. I am hoping it sells itself on it’s geek merits alone. In Spring 1995, as a physics undergraduate, as a final project in a computational physics class, I wrote a Fortran program to simulate the orbit around the Sun of an asteroid in the asteroid belt, perturbed by the orbit of Jupiter, and demonstrate the difference between the asteroid being in a orbit resonant with Jupiter’s or not. The asteroid’s motion is described by an ordinary differential equation given to me by Sir Isaac Newton himself; the program uses the Fourth-Order Runge Kutta method to approximate a solution. For this presentation, I am attempting to port this program to Haskell and report on any interesting comparisons/contrasts with the original program.

You may be interested in this presentation if you are interested in: Haskell, Fortran, functional programming, Newtonian mechanics, the solar system, differential equations, numerical analysis, OpenGL, the Millennium Falcon chase through the asteroid field from The Empire Strikes Back. (No promises on that last one.)
Deech’s talk will be a reprise of his former talk on delimited continuations in Haskell hopefully this time with slides that were tragically lost at the original airing.
Pizza will be provided by OCI – thanks!

Things I Hate About You

Posted: July 5, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

Our special July edition of the Lambda Lounge is upon us.  Tonight (Thursday, July 5th) we’ll have lightning talks on the theme of “Things I Hate About You” about your favorite tool or technology.

The current roster of talks (possibly with a couple more coming):

– You git what you git and you don’t throw a fit – Jessica Kerr
– RSpec is the Devil – Mario Aquino
– Xcode Sucks – Heath Borders
– Leap seconds – Bryan Venable
– Haskell Sucks – Deech
– Everything Under the Sun Considered Harmful – Matt Wittmann

Join us tonight at 6 pm!

June: Zookeeper and Erlang

Posted: June 4, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

Lambda Lounge June is this Thursday at 6:00 pm as usual.  We’ve got two great talks lined up:

  1. Tom Wheeler will be doing an overview of Zookeeper, the ever more important distributed control service used with Hadoop and a number of other distributed frameworks.
  2. Ben Lee will be giving us “A Taste of Erlang” – get your feet with your favorite Swedish functional programming language.
Some of you may recall local entrepreneur Michael Schade. Sadly he has left St. Louis, but happily he is now supporting developers at Stripe, a service that makes it easy for developers to process credit cards.  Stripe will be sponsoring Lambda Lounge this month!  Thanks Stripe!
Also, I have Lambda Lounge STICKERS!  But you have to come to the meeting if you want one.

Lambda Calculus in April

Posted: April 26, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

The next Lambda Lounge is next Thursday in the new location – 680 Craig Rd. Bill Burdick is coming in from KC to do a talk about lambda calculus as well as his own new language, Leisure. Leisure is a lazy, untyped language that compiles to JavaScript.

Also check out his lambda calculus evaluator and Space Invaders in lambda calculus!

Pizza will be provided by n3rds.com – check ’em out!

Lambda Lounge March

Posted: February 28, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

One short leap month later, it’s time for Lambda Lounge March!  In like an OS X Mountain Lion, out like a lambda right?  Something like that.  We’ll meet on Thursday March 1st at 6 pm in the usual location.

Two great talks this month, as usual.  First up we’ve got Chris Gore talking about Evolutionary Algorithms in Lisp.  And then we have Jim Duey coming in from Kansas City to talk about DSLs in Clojure, a topic he’ll be talking about soon at Clojure/West.

Jay DeLong from RCGA will also be stopping by to give us a quick overview of some of the great startup stuff going on in St. Louis right now.  This is a pretty good overview …

Hadoop, Clojure, Robots

Posted: January 31, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

We have two interesting talks scheduled this month (oh wait, that’s every month).

John Leach will be talking about Hadoop and HBase.  John runs the St. Louis Hadoop User’s Group and is currently working on a cloud-based Hadoop marketing platform.  Hadoop is the Apache project for distributed storage and map/reduce and HBase is a BigTable-like database platform built on top of Hadoop.

David McNeil will be talking about “Building a DSL in Clojure For Controlling a Lego MindStorm/ Arduino Robot”.  As you might notice Lego MindStorm and Arduino are different platforms so this is really a talk about creating abstractions in Clojure.  And robots.  Robots!

Many thanks to Cloudera for sponsoring this month’s meeting.  If you’re interested in learning more about Hadoop, our very own Tom Wheeler is now working as an instructor for Cloudera and will be doing a class right here in St. Louis at the end of February.

January Meeting

Posted: January 3, 2012 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized

Lambda Lounge is back for the new year this Thursday Jan 5th at the normal time and place!

Our first talk will be Ryan Senior giving us an introduction to logic programming with Clojure’s core.logic library.  Ryan has been delving deep into the black arts of Prolog, Kanren, and Clojure’s take on how to do logic programming and will give us a gentle introduction.

The second talk will be Alex Miller doing a non-technical talk called “Life and Death at the Dawn of Computing” exploring some interesting dualities during the birth of computing.