7th Ghent Functional Programming Group meeting on Tuesday, April 26

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Jasper Van der Jeugt

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Apr 1, 2011, 1:20:41 PM4/1/11
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Dear all,

We are very glad to announce an exciting program for the 7th meeting of the
Ghent Functional Programming Group, especially since we are celebrating our
first year of existence today. Our program features no less than three
interesting functional programming languages: Erlang, Haskell and Scheme.

The meeting will take place on Tuesday, April 26 in the Technicum building of
Ghent University (Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Gent) at 19h30. As before, to
enter the building, you should go to the automatic sliding door on the far left
of the building and dial the phone number that is provided on the note taped to
the door. Someone will then open the door for you.

Our program is as follows:

1. Tom Van Custem - Experiments with MapReduce in Erlang

MapReduce is a programming model for large data processing popularized by, and
in daily use at Google. The MapReduce model builds strongly on key tenets of
functional programming such as higher-order functions and side-effect free
execution. In this talk, we summarize this programming model and describe a
didactic implementation in Erlang. Invented at Ericsson's research labs, Erlang
is known for its massively concurrent programming model, and itself builds on a
functional core language. The talk will not focus on Erlang as such, but we will
describe its key features as needed to understand the MapReduce abstraction.

2. Tom Schrijvers - How you could have won the VPW 2011 contest with Haskell

We all know that Functional Programming is great for writing concise solutions
for programming problems. With some skill this can even be done quickly! Yet,
there was little evidence of this at the 3rd edition of the Flemish
Programming Contest (VPW 2011) that took place on March 23. Not so before
the contest: The jury stress-tested all questions by writing various
solutions in different languages. Haskell was used to solve most problems
and invariably produced short solutions.

In this talk I present my own Haskell solutions to several of this year's
problems and discuss alternative solution strategies with the audience. After
the talk you will be all set for winning next year's edition -- or at least
enjoying it -- using Haskell.

3. Pieter Audenaert - Functional Geometry and a Graphical Language

We will discuss a simple language for drawing images. During the presentation we
will illustrate the power of data abstraction and algebraic closure, meanwhile
using higher order procedures in an essential manner. The language has been
designed to easy experimenting with patterns such as those appearing in typical
M.C. Escher drawings where the artist repeats the pattern both moving it across
the drawing and scaling it when applicable. In the language we use procedures to
represent the data objects that will be combined in the final drawing and we
make sure that all operations conducted on these procedures are algebraically
closed. These features allow generating patterns of any complexity.

For our implementation, we use the LISP functional programming language -- more
accurately, the Scheme dialect. The presentation is based on "Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs", Abelson & Sussman

Hope to see you there!

The GhentFPG organizing committee,
Andy Georges
Jeroen Janssen
Jasper Van der Jeugt

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