Lambda Lounge

This Thursday Dec. 1st is the next edition of the Lambda Lounge!  This month we have lightning talks and we’ve got a great set planned:

• Simple Made Easy: The Ramones – Jeff Sigmon
• Pattern Matching in F# – Jessica Kerr
• Galileo Was Wrong – Deech
• xmonad – Scott Bale
• Computational Geometry: Convex Hulls, Intersections, and Triangulations! Oh My! – Michael Schade
• Introduction to Cryptography – Tom Wheeler

Pizza will be provided by Technology Partners.

For those of you that have been attending Lambda Lounge for a while, this will be the 3 year anniversary of the first Lambda Lounge!  Hard to believe.  In 3 short years we’ve had talks in the following languages: Ocaml, Groovy, Clojure, Objective C, Ruby, JavaScript, Erlang, Haskell, F#, Perl 6, Factor, Python, Fan (now Fantom), Fortress, Scala, Piet, Ook, LOLCODE, Inform 7, CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, Lua, Kotlin, and of course Java.  Not to mention quite a few other topics besides!

That first meeting was awesome for me because I mashed together a bunch of groups of people I knew (plus a bunch of people I didn’t!) and find a common thread.  It was great to see all those smart people in one room.  Ryan Senior did a talk on OCaml and that was the first time that I met him – now he sits next to me at Revelytix and is an integral part of the Strange Loop team.  Matt Taylor also did a talk on Groovy – little did we know he would be on to bigger  things in California before we knew it.

For me personally Lambda Lounge was a place to explore new (to me) ideas of functional and dynamic programming languages.  Now I use a functional and dynamic language every day!

Many thanks to all for continuing to share at Lambda Lounge – I still love seeing everyone every month and miss it badly when I can’t make it.

This Thursday, Nov. 3rd is the next Lambda Lounge meeting!  We’ll have:

• Ken Sipe – talking about the new JVM language Kotlin, a work in progress by JetBrains.  Ken interviewed Andrey Breslav about the language on the Strange Loop podcast.
• David Hollander – talking about building Asynchronous Servers in LuaJIT.  Learn more here.
• Pizza will be provided by Relay Technology.

Thursday October 6th is time for the next Lambda Lounge meeting.  We’ll be having two talks about languages that compile to JavaScript.  In CoffeeScript‘s corner, Mark Volkmann will be giving us an overview.  Nate Young will be showing us how to sneak Lisp into your browser with ClojureScript.

As always, the meetings starts at 6 pm at 1099 Milwaukee in Kirkwood, MO.  Head in the east door (Milwaukee side) and down the stairs.

Pizza will be provided by Experis.

Get out of the pool and head on over to the Lambda Lounge this Thursday night June 2nd at 6pm:

• James Carr on RabbitMQ
• David Difranco on Apache Thrift

Tomorrow, Thursday May 5th is the next Lambda Lounge meeting!  Come on out to hear two great talks:

• Immutable, Versioned Map – Mark Volkmann – exploring Mark’s Java Map implementation built on immutable versioned data (as opposed to mutable data ala HashMap or Clojure’s immutable version)
• Erlang OTP – Zac Duncan – OTP is Erlang’s library for building highly resilient server infrastructure

It’s time for the March meeting of the Lambda Lounge!

We’ll have talks on two new topics this month:

• Inform 7 – a DSL for Interactive Fiction – Adam Thornton
• Source Code Version Management with Branching & Merging – Stephen Venters

Adam will walk us through a different kind of language than we normally see – Inform 7 is a domain specific language for creating interactive fiction like the classic Zork of old.

Stephen Venters will be talking about version control management, specifically how to work with branching and merging to leverage the full capability of your VCS.

This meeting will be the LAST meeting at Appistry. 😦 Appistry has been an eager and amazing host since the very first Lambda Lounge meeting in December 2008. Having them available as a stable home for the Lambda Lounge has been an important part of the group’s success. In particular, I want to thank Michael Groner for his tireless work setting up and tearing down for the meeting at Appistry over the last couple years. In the future we will probably be at the Revelytix offices in Kirkwood but that will be announced for sure before the April meeting.

It’s cold outside … come to the Lambda Lounge tonight at 6 pm and wrap yourself in a cozy blanket of parentheses with two Clojure-based talks from the Revelytix crew.

First, we will have Alex Miller speaking about a new concurrency framework for event-driven processing built on top of fork/join and how they’re using it to process queries.

Second, we will have Nate Young with his alluring C O N T C E P T I O N talk about functional parser combinators in Haskell and Clojure. Prepare your mind to be expanded!

Pizza will be provided by Ferguson Consulting.

Hard to believe but it’s almost time for the first Lambda Lounge of 2011!

We’ve got a stellar line-up for the first meeting of the year:

• Lightning talk: Inform-7 – Adam Thornton will be talking about this language for writing interactive fiction (like Zork of old)
• Functional data structures – Aditya Siram will be talking about functional data structures as described in Okasaki’s classic text Purely Functional Data Structures
• C# dynamic keyword – Jay Tuley will be talking about the dynamic keyword in C# added to allow access to the Dynamic Language Runtime

The meeting will be held Thursday, Jan 6th at 6:00 pm in the usual Appistry location. Pizza will be provided by Riot Games which is opening an office right here in Clayton. I’m sure we’ll get an update on that as well.

Here’s some info on the recently announced “Open Missouri project“:

“In its initial phase, Open Missouri will serve as a portal where journalists, citizens and businesses can learn about the databases held by state government agencies. The portal will join the growing government transparency movement across the United States and serve as a model for other locations. My goals for the portal are to raise awareness of the data held by state agencies, encourage increased use of the data, and foster civic engagement at the state and community levels.”

And here’s some more background on the project…

Gabe Lozano from LockerDome asked me to help get the word out that they are looking for a back-end web developer.

LockerDome is a local St. Louis startup building a sort of “LinkedIn” for sports. They’ve got paying customers and seem to be on a great trajectory. Check it out…