Lambda Lounge

Somehow it’s March and time for the next great Lambda Lounge meeting!

First up we’ll have James Carr (@jamescarr) talking about Behavior Driven Development with jspec:

Behavior Driven Development is a technique for improving collaboration and development by using examples of how a system or API works from the outside-in to drive it’s development. To illustrate, I’ll use the javascript based spec framework jspec to demonstrate how to build a javascript library one example at a time.

Following that, Ryan Senior will give us a run-down of emacs and when it will finally achieve sufficient intelligence to become SkyNet.

This meeting is sponsored by Object Computing (OCI). Thanks OCI!

The Lambda Lounge February meeting is just one week away! This month (Feb 4th), Matt Stine will be traveling to St. Louis to talk about Polyglot OSGi:

One of the greatest benefits of OSGi is its firewall-esque encapsulation of implementation details. The only traffic that gets in or out is the traffic that you explicitly specify, otherwise all bets are off. The aspiring polyglot can bring in the right tool for the right job by hiding it behind OSGi services as an “implementation detail,” provided that only Java language types are exported. The talk will look at the pros and cons of this approach, experiment with Groovy, Clojure, and Scala in an OSGI container, and also look at the “gotchas” involved along the way.

In other words, you can totally use OSGi to implement your own component in whatever cool language you want and throw it over the wall to those dopes next door using Java. Unless they do it to you first. Wait…maybe they already have!

As usual, the meeting starts at 6 pm at the Appistry office at 10845 Olive Blvd, Suite 260, St. Louis, MO 63141. This month’s meeting is sponsored by NetEffects. Thanks!

I wanted to put some info up here about the upcoming St. Louis Innovation Camp. Brian Blanchard contacted me about this last year and has been working hard at putting the pieces in place. This thing is gonna be awesome.

The idea is to bring together all kinds of people interested in startups – business, marketing, developers, whoever for a weekend focused on building new companies in St. Louis. The event will include a training series, an innovator’s cup for the best ideas, and workshops about how to take an idea and turn it into a company.

The St. Louis Innovation Camp will be held Feb. 26-28th at UMSL and the cost to attend is $50. If you’re interested in sponsoring, speaking, or helping out please drop an email to info@stlinnovationcamp.com. If you want to attend:

Register Now!!

Due to the bad weather, I am canceling the January meeting on January 7th. We will reschedule the Erlang and GPars talks for later months. February 4th will still be Matt Stine’s Polyglot OSGi talk. See you there!

This coming Thursday, December 3rd at 6 pm (usual Appistry location), we will have the December Lambda Lounge meeting, which happens to be the first birthday for the lounge. The first meeting of the lounge was just one year ago where we kicked things off with talks about OCaml from Ryan Senior and about Groovy Metaprogramming from Matt Taylor.

It is thus fitting that Matt Taylor will present a topic a bit off the usual pace for the December meeting: Humanity 2.0. Matt has been developing this talk for at least six months without really having a good place to present it. I have seen some early slides and heard some early feedback that it will be a fascinating look at where our technological evolution is headed.

I also hope to do a quick recap of the year and maybe we can chat about things we’d like to do next year. We already have things planned for the first couple months of 2010. In January I’ll be taking a look at GPars, the Groovy parallel programming library and new dad Chris Newgent will be talking about Erlang Mnesia. In February Matt Stine will be traveling in from Memphis to talk about polyglot programming with OSGi. And in March James Carr is planned to look at BDD testing with jspec. Great stuff!

Technology Partners will be sponsoring the December meeting – thanks!

This Thursday November 5th will be a Haskell hackfest music jam session held at Technology Partners (NOT Appistry as usual). map

SuperCollider is a real-time audio-synthesizer server with great Haskell bindings. People have done some pretty amazing things with it. Basically it is a server that speaks the Open Sound Control binary protocol and produces any sound you can imagine. Using the metaphor of an audio mixer, each client runs on a different channel so we will truly be jamming real-time.

I can provide a server with SuperCollider pre-loaded and client computers can easily install the bindings using Haskell Platform and Cabal. Clients do not need to have SuperCollider installed.

This meeting will be sponsored by Technology Partners.

Hope to see you there!

The September meeting is nearly upon us and it promises not to disappoint.  Not since “The Sound and the Fury” tour of Clapton and Vaughan have two titans been paired up in a universe-realigning, consciousness-altering, anomaly  of sights, sounds, and smells.  Local Groovy/Grails sage and accomplished ventriloquist, Jeff Brown, will be exploring the many powerful metaprogramming capabilities of Groovy.

Also gracing the podium this month will be Tim Dalton (yes, *the* Tim Dalton), Scala expert, just back from receiving an Honorary Doctorate in Pantomime from the Sorbonne.  What has two thumbs and will be presenting on external DSLs using Scala parser combinators?

         o_ This Guy _o
        /              \

This month’s food sponsor is Lisa Rokusek of AgentHR.  Please come out to the Appistry offices for what should be a great night!

Another great meeting is planned for Thursday night! First up, Matt Follett will be talking about Perl and how despite rumors to the contrary, it’s not dead yet. Should be an interesting talk.

The second talk this month will be Aditya Siram talking about Haskell’s Software Transactional Memory system. We’ve looked at STMs in passing with other languages like Clojure and Fortress. It will be good to focus on it with Haskell and really explore it in detail.

Come on out Thursday night at the Appistry offices as usual. Meeting starts at 6 pm.

You can find info from Alex Miller‘s talk on the Sun research language Project Fortress here:

• Slides
• Video

And you can find info from Scott Bale‘s talk on Fan here:

• Slides (coming soon)
• Video

If you’re interested in catching future video, you can catch the feed from blip.tv or we’re on iTunes.

This month at the Lambda Lounge (Thursday, July 2nd, 6 pm), we will bringing you two NEW languages that start with F.

First, Alex Miller will be introducing you to a research language called Fortress aimed at people doing scientific computation on large (peta-size) systems. It is a language that explicitly tries to meet the challenge of running systems up to a million cores and is “infested” with parallelism. This is a language for tomorrow.

Next, Scott Bale will be talking about the Fan programming language. This language takes the best of languages like Java and C#, throws out the cruft, and bleeds in some modern features.

Should be a great night with two languages making their debut at the Lounge.