PDXfunc meeting notes summary: July 13, 2009

[Igal Koshevoy]

We had a great meeting at Lucky Lab SE. This was our first meeting since the unfortunate demise of CubeSpace, which hosted all of the group's meetings other than the initial meeting in November 2007.

VENUE

Reactions to the Lucky Lab venue were mixed. We liked having food and drink available, not needing to go to a separate venue after the meeting was convenient, and most of the attendees stayed long after the meeting was over. However, there were issues: We had 20-25 people, yet almost completely filled up the room; the event room's poor acoustics and the main room's noise made it hard to hear; it cost $100 to rent the room (thanks to those that donated to help cover the cost). Anyway, I'll keep searching for another venue.

PRESENTATIONS

1. Howard Lewis Ship presented Clojure

• Clojure is a Lisp dialect that runs on the Java Virtual machine: http://clojure.org/
• Benefits:
• Lisp syntax provides a natural, proven way to manipulate code and data.
• Functional features and data structures are baked in.
  
• Transactional memory and reactive agents provide for clear, correct multithreaded code.
• Practical, stable and extensible platform, it runs on the JVM and can interoperate with Java.
• Disclaimers:
• Syntax of Lisp can baffle and annoy those not accustomed to it, although some find it very natural.
• IDE support is limited, although Eclipse, vim, Emacs and others have syntax highlighting packages.
• Full benefits can only be gained by coding in Clojure and carefully handling Java calls, but the same goes for any JVM language.
• Scala has had much greater adoption in the non-Java JVM language field for a complex list of reasons too long for this summary.
  
• Resources:
• Slides from Howard's Open Source Bridge talk on Clojure: http://www.slideshare.net/hlship/clojure-functional-concurrency-for-the-jvm-presented-at-open-source-bridge
• "Programming Clojure" book by Stuart Halloway: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure
• "Comprehensive overview of Clojure" online: http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html
• "Clojure Tutorial For the Non-Lisp Programmer" online: http://www.moxleystratton.com/article/clojure/for-non-lisp-programmers
• "Clojure Programming Wikibooks": http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming
• "Learning Clojure Wikibook": http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_Clojure

2. Howard Lewis Ship presented Cascade

• Cascade is a web application framework for Clojure. The code is under heavy development and is pre-alpha, so if you'd like to help out, get in touch with Howard. Cascade is heavily inspired by Howard's well-respected Tapestry web application framework for Java.
• Resources:
• Howard's slides: http://www.slideshare.net/hlship/cascade-1720339
• Cascade's source code: http://github.com/hlship/cascade/tree/master

For those interested in functional programming on the JVM, please also check out Scala and the brand new Scala user group: http://groups.google.com/group/pdxscala

Thanks to all that came to the meeting, and a huge thanks to Howard for his excellent presentations, cool software, and support of open source.

-igal