The future of Bris Functional

[ja...@ioctl.org]

Saw Joe at TCA the other day, spoke a bit about this. Thought it's worth
kicking off some discussion about this.

Should say that I've really enjoyed BF - it's been intellectually
stimulating, and really reignited my love of things functional. But I
think we do ened to try to bring a bit of structure to our monthly
gatherings.

An unordered list of stuff:

- new blood - students, further afield?

- some plans in advance of topics would be nice

- invited speakers. Reach out to the Bristol universities now, perhaps?

- topics: it'd be nice to see fp in use "in anger" - practical things like
application frameworks.

- and tools and techniques - quickcheck is still on my list of stuff I'd
like to hear about.

- also nice to intersperse these with theoretical sessions, to improve our
(well, my, anyway - this is my list) facility with things like first-
class continuations; higher-order type-level programming; arrows. The
type systems of various langauges and solving typical "pattern"
problem statements using them. Under-the-hood stuff like diving into
functional fdata structures more deeply.

- I'd still like to try giving a "monad" talk :-)

- I think with some advanced preparation (quite a bit) we can still
motivate sessions for learning about fp techniques with "brain teasers".
I'm not talking necessarily about dojoing thorugh Euler problems.
Picking something a little more open-ended (Matt's rubik's cube is a
good example); or the regexp "crossword", tsunamis. These can be used
to look at aspects of data representation, control and/or data flow,
etc.

- larger projects or presentations of stuff we've used FP for. I've an ML
compiler (of sorts) that targets javascript. Writing parsers in ML is
nothing like writing parsers in a call-by-need language on first blush,
but you can still use higher-order programming to express them in a
very similar way.

- I don't mind focussing on Clojure (Nokia, our gracious hosts, must be
one of the south-west's largest users) but it'd be nice to have sessions
devoted to other languages on a reasonably regular basis.

- and still have the opportunity to retire to the pub afterwards and
natter about Haskell with Arwyn :-)


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jan grant http://ioctl.org/jan/

[Matthew Gilliard]

Thanks Jan, amazing!

  We've been talking about BrisFunctional's format and its future recently and once a couple of things are confirmed we will share our ideas for August and meetups beyond that.  I shalln't give any more detail right now but expect announcements soon.

  Thanks to all of you for your help over the last (/ 5 2) years - we're determined to make it a successful, useful and fun group.  Look forward to having you all along.

Matthew

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[Matthew Gilliard]

  Right!  August's meetup will be next week (27th), just after the bank holiday.  Joe's volunteered to lead a hack night exploring Probabalistic Data Structures, of which the best known are probably the Bloom Filter and the Skip List.  There's more here, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Probabilistic_data_structures  I hope that many of you can make it and help us hack up something cool, deepening our understanding of both FP and the exciting world of esoteric comp sci.

  Starting next month we are going to change the format a little.  BrisFunctional has been going two and a half years now.  I think it's gone brilliantly - I've met some astoundingly smart people and learned some cool things, which would not have been otherwise possible.  But recently we've been down on numbers, struggling to find topics and we weren't sure what to do about it.  After some thought, and some persistent prodding*, we realised that what we really want out of BrisFunc is this: A place to go and spend an evening learning about some fascinating corner of CompSci and programming.  Personally I find that really exciting, and I'm totally convinced that many of you agree and sure that there's many more people like you - but what we've been missing is a way to consistently give that.

  Our best evenings have been when someone has spent some time preparing a presentation and guiding us.  Zippers, Overtone, Scala+Akka, Concurrency, Game Programming, Lambda Calculus, Midje, Functional Web, and so on.  From September onwards we will insist upon it!  Which means that every meetup will have a topic, a speaker and a roomful of people eager to feed their inner geek.

  We need your help: Firstly - as attendees.  Secondly to help us promote BrisFunc to a wider crowd (do you know of another meetup we can become friends with? A contact at a local university?).  Thirdly, we need speakers!  (NB _not_necessarily_ experts, just be prepared to do a bit of research and treat it like show-and-tell).

  Want to come along? https://github.com/BrisFunctional/plans/wiki

  Learn about what now? https://github.com/BrisFunctional/plans/wiki/Topics

  Want to help out? https://github.com/BrisFunctional/plans/wiki/Speaker

 

  Hope to see you there: https://github.com/BrisFunctional/plans/wiki/Upcoming-Meetups - here's to the next years of BrisFunctional, I can't wait to see how it goes

Matthew

* thanks Jan :)

[Joe Littlejohn]

Those expecting esoteric comp sci may be sorely disappointed :)

Broadly, the plan for next Tuesday is to pick a couple of interesting probabilistic data structures, implement them and put them to work on a fun task.

Hopefully next month we'll be able to kick off the 'new' BrisFunc format and have more pre-prepared/structured sessions from September.

[Willem van den Ende]

I'd be happy to run a session on quickcheck (or alternatively, you could ask Nat Pryce, his workshop at SPA was good fun). Still exploring it (in haskell, not that keen on the ruby or javascript versions).

[Matthew Gilliard]

Willem - That would be great!  Can I put you down for the October meetup?

  Matthew

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