Posts Tagged ‘meeting’

February: Julia + Common Lisp Object System

Posted: February 4, 2014 by marioeaquino in Uncategorized
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This February, Lambda Lounge features two talks and much sushi.

Hear Nathan Tippy on the Julia programming language.
Hear Chris Gore on the Common Lisp Object System or CLOS (pronounced either ‘KLOSS’  or ‘SEE-LOSS’, though the latter subject you to the ridicule of Common Lispers).
Eat sushi, sponsored by OCI.
Bring your own beverage(s), or bring some to share.
Thursday, 6 February, 2014
Food at 6pm, meeting at 6:30 (at the earliest), with a brief intermission between talks.
Location: Revelytix, in Creve Coeur.  Detailed directions here
Price of admission (optional): bring a friend, or bring a food. Food items benefit Circle of Concern, a local food pantry. They can also use items like toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, pet food, laundry detergent and diapers.
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April Meeting – Factor and Parrot

Posted: March 29, 2009 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized
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This Thursday, April 2nd is the April meeting of the Lambda Lounge. We’ll be grooving on two totally new topics for the lounge: the concatenative language Factor and the Parrot VM.

First, local polyglot Kyle Cordes will be giving a talk on the Factor language. Factor is a concatenative language where functions are always applied postfix to the values on the stack. Factor has an object system similar to CLOS in Lisp and concurrency functionality inspired by message-passing in languages like Erlang.

Other concatenative languages that I’ve heard of are Joy and Forth (there are others of course). Here are a pair of good articles on Joy (by two of my favorite bloggers Debasish Ghosh and Daniel Spiewak) which may be reminiscent of what we will see in Factor. I’m looking forward to learning more in the talk.

Second, Charles Sharp will be giving a talk about Parrot, the VM that has grown out of the now mythic Perl 6. However, Parrot 1.0 was just released on March 17th, so this is a very timely talk. Even though Parrot grew out of Perl 6 ideas, it is intended to support many dynamic languages and a number of languages are currently working in some form on Parrot. [I note that there are implementations of both Forth and Joy on Parrot, hinting at some grand unification talk here. :)]

As always, this should be an epic fun and geeky event and I any and all in sight of St. Louis to check it out.

March Meeting – F#, Monads

Posted: March 1, 2009 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized
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This week at the St. Louis Lambda Lounge, we’ll get a double-dose of functional programming and it should be a great night. The meeting is on Thursday March 5th at 6 pm at the offices of our kind hosts, Appistry. As always, the meeting is free and open to all.

First up we’ll have Ken Sipe, well-known speaker and author, giving us the rundown on F#, the new functional object hybrid language from Microsoft. I’ve seen Ken speak a bunch of times and he’s always worth seeing, as you’d expect from a No Fluff Just Stuff tour veteran.

I’ve been looking at a lot of F# lately and I find it to be a really impressive language. It reminds me in many ways of Scala, which is walking vaguely similar territory by pushing a hybrid functional approach on the JVM. F# comes out of the OCaml tradition. We saw Ryan Senior give us a great introduction to OCaml at the December meeting. I have no doubt that Ken will give us a great intro and some interesting opinions on FP as well.

Following that we’ll have the incomparable and ineffable Michael Easter doing a talk with the curious title “Monads are Burritos”. What does it mean? Will Michael pierce the veil of monadic obscurity with a new metaphor based on the flour tortilla of spicy goodness? You won’t know if you don’t check it out. I expect we’ll see some Haskell in this talk (for the first, but certainly not the last time at a Lambda Lounge) and I’m confident Michael’s talk will enlighten and entertain.

If you’re in the St. Louis area, a geek would be hard-pressed to find a juicier night of entertainment. That is of course, unless you happen to be partaking in the NFJS Gateway Software Symposium this weekend where Ken and many other fabulous speakers will be doing their thing. If you’re coming in from the outlying areas, why not come in one night earlier and get a free teaser? Everyone is welcome….

If you can’t catch us this month, meetings are the first Thursday of every month and we’ve got lots more great talks already scheduled.

February Meeting

Posted: January 31, 2009 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized
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The February meeting is just around the corner this coming Thursday February 5th at 6 pm.

On tap for this month:

  • Nate Young – Functional programming with Javascript
  • Alex Miller – Actor concurrency with Erlang

Nate will be talking about some aspects of the Lambda Calculus and how they can be implemented in Javascript and how to use method chaining/continuation passing to develop event-driven web pages.

Alex will be talking about actor concurrency, which is a different model for concurrency than the more common shared state and locks model that is prevalent today. It’s based on processes (light-weight user-space threads) and message-passing. Erlang is probably the best-known language to embrace actor concurrency and will be the focus of the examples.

More info:

Hope to see you there!

January meeting

Posted: January 8, 2009 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized
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The January meeting was held last night and about 40 people showed up, so another great turn-out. I think the presentations from Mario, David, and Mark were all fun topics and I learned a lot. I blogged at much greater length what transpired so I won’t repeat it here. Many thanks to all for coming out!

Stop in next month (February 5th) for talks on Actor concurrency (from me) and functional programming in Javascript from Nate Young.

Thanks everyone for getting the group off to a solid first couple months…

Great first meeting!

Posted: December 5, 2008 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized
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The first meeting of the lounge was great! It was very cool to see so many folks I know and so many folks I didn’t already know. I was thrilled at the turnout and I hope everyone continues to make it out.

I blogged a bit more of the happenings and I’ll add more links here as I see them.

See ya next month – Wed January 7th at 6 pm!

More blogs:

December meeting topics

Posted: November 15, 2008 by Alex Miller in Uncategorized
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Thanks all for the great response to Lambda Lounge so far!

At this point, I think topics for the first meeting (December 4th) have solidified. I’m planning on kicking off the meeting with an open discussion about what functional and dynamic languages are and we can maybe arm wrestle about whether the two have anything to do with each other.

Next, Matt Taylor of G2One SpringSource will talk about Groovy MetaProgramming with Categories and Mixins.

Finally, Ryan Senior of Ferguson Consulting is going to do an overview of OCaml, of which I know not much, other than that it is a mixture of object and functional styles, dervied from a ML-style static type system (but with type inference).

Should be a great December meeting. The tentative plan for January (on Wednesday the 7th due to the holiday) is for Mario Aquino to talk about dynamic programming in either iPhone or Dashboard widget development and for Mark Volkmann to talk about Squeak Smalltalk.

It is so far totally coincidental to have a functional topic and a dynamic one on the first meeting. But maybe that’s a trend worth continuing. If you have topics you’d like to present or just to request, please use the Google group mailing list so it’s easier to distribute and archive the conversation.