EFPUG Meeting Reminder!

[Abram Hindle]

Hello Everybody! Reminder there is a meeting today!


Jan 8 Meeting Programming with Monads
<http://efpug.blogspot.ca/2012/12/jan-8-meeting-programming-with-monads.html>


Presenter: Roshan Shariff

Title: Programming with Monads

When: January 8th @ 6:00 pm in *CSC 3-49 (1 floor above our usual floor)*

When you write a program, you probably want it to do things like talking
to the Internet, displaying images, or even just reading and writing
files and accepting input. It's hard to imagine how any of these could
be encoded into pure mathematical functions which simply take an input,
produce an output, and have no other side effects. So if you're
programming in a pure functional language like Haskell, how do you write
programs that do interesting things?
Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out that all of these things and more
can be embedded inside a pure functional language using a concept called
a "monad". In this talk I will describe what monads are and how they are
used. We will see how different monads correspond to different notions
of computation, including but not limited to input/output and side
effects. We will focus on the idea that a monad is just a software
design pattern that can be used to structure code in an easy-to-use way.

There are no prerequisites for this talk. Some background in functional
programming would be useful, but I'll explain the basics as I go along.
I will be using Haskell, but you won't need any prior knowledge of it to
understand the material. Monads have become so popular, in fact, that a
quick Google search will turn up implementations in languages like C++,
Java, and Javascript. We will discuss how monads and similar ideas are
powerful tools to think about and write better code in any language.

[Roshan Shariff]

Hello!

Thanks to everyone who came to the presentation, and I hope you found it useful. If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, or would like to discuss anything I talked about, please feel free to email me.

The slides for this presentation are available at <https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5iw-UVgBBQRbHBSaC1EUEhBbDQ/edit> I would recommend downloading the PDF file instead of using the online viewer.

Roshan

[Abram Hindle]

http://efpug.blogspot.ca/2012/12/jan-8-meeting-programming-with-monads.html

I updated the blog with a link to the slides. Thanks a lot Roshan!

abram