April 2012 Meeting Coming Up Thursday! Topic Discussion!

[Justin Etheredge]

Hello everyone!

It is that time again! Our April 2012 meeting is coming up next Thursday. I had been speaking on the side with Stuart Leitch and Al Tenhundfeld about the possibility of doing another meeting on functional programming. Thanks to Al's sleuthing it appears that the last time we discussed the topic was May 2009. Almost 3 years ago! Wow!

Anyways, I wanted to throw the topic out to the group to see if there had been any movement in this space in the last 3 years. I'm pretty sure that last time we had discussed the topic, it was more of a curiosity than anything. I don't think anyone at the group was regularly using a true functional language. I was wondering if anyone in the group has been using a functional language like Clojure, Scala, F#, or Erlang in their professional development, or if anyone was using another language with functional concepts and really employing it to the same effects.

We were thinking that the topic would be really interesting if we had a few people with some real experience and expertise who could participate. Soooooo.... anyone out there want to step up to the plate?

Whatever the topic ends up being, we will be meeting at Snagajob's new headquarters in Innsbrook.

Here is the address:

4851 Lake Brook Drive, Glen Allen, VA

As always, please let me know if you're planning to attend! We will try to get a cooler room this time!

[Justin Etheredge]

Also, as a side note, Marcus mentioned in the thread for the last meeting that he was working on a self describing API, but we never got to talk about it. I'd be very interested in holding a meeting on API design in the near future. Let me know if you guys are interested in that discussion.

[Adam Rabung]

I'll be there!

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[Justin Etheredge]

Excellent! You were one of the people that we were very interested in being there :-)

[Marcus McConnell]

I'll be there. 

I'm happy to talk about the restful API stuff that I've been working on recently. Some of the challenges have been security, documentation, hyper-media/self-describing, error handling and data formats.

Marcus

[Mike Huffaker]

I will try to make it.

Mike

On Apr 22, 2012, at 2:05 PM, Justin Etheredge wrote:

[Peter Fries]

I'll be there

[Tobias O'Leary]

I'll be there.

It's on April 26th at 4851 Lake Brook Drive, Glen Allen, VA starting at 6PM, right?

-Tobias

[Justin Etheredge]

Yep, 6pm.

[Jonathan Pryor]

I'll be there.

- Jon

[Justin Etheredge]

Just a reminder, the meeting is tomorrow night at 6pm. If you want to attend, please let me know!

On Saturday, April 21, 2012 9:28:20 PM UTC-4, Justin Etheredge wrote:

[David Janke]

i'll be there

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[Stuart Leitch]

I'll be there but won't require food.

Cheers,

Stuart 

[Dallas Edwards]

I'll be there.

--
Dallas Edwards

[Al Tenhundfeld]

Good discussion tonight. Thanks for putting together the presentation and leading the conversation, Adam. 

If you enjoyed the topic tonight, you should watch this presentation by Rich Hickey about managing state, persistent data structures, and functional programming. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich-Hickey

I think it's the same video Justin referenced. If you've never seen Rich Hickey speak, get ready for some deep thoughts. I've seen him speak a few times in person, and he's possibly my favorite tech speaker. 

Al

[Adam Rabung]

Great timing, John Carmack on FP in C++:

http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programming-in-c/

[David Janke]

Reminds me of a  (much shorter) post I read last month that ...  "[pushing] the statefulness to a higher level and let the caller worry about it"

http://prog21.dadgum.com/131.html

haven't tracked it, but i think a lot (most?) of the bugs/complexity problems I see in the existing code bases i've worked on is caused by methods with unexpected side effects or that rely on some variables (state) managed elsewhere

Missed last night's meeting... car trouble. Just out of curiosity, was anyone actively using a functional language for development, or was the discussion more around applying fp concepts to the more widespread general-purpose languages?

[Adam Rabung]

Hi David,

I talked about my experiments with FP concepts on a recent Scala project. That led to lots of interesting discussions :)

Adam

[Justin Etheredge]

Meant to reply before now, but thank you Adam for guiding the discussion at the last RSCG meeting. I learned a ton and thought the discussion was awesome!

Our next meeting will be May 31st, start thinking of topics!