next week's Haskell meetup

[Sukant Hajra]

Hi everyone,

I'm cross-posting to both the Austin Scala and the Austin FP mailing lists.
There's some recent initiative to kick up the Austin Haskell meetups again,
which I'm really excited about. They're at Rackspace, and there's one next
week:

http://www.meetup.com/ATX-Haskell/events/183852652/

Please come if you can. The Clojure group keeps going strong, but we've had a
long break with both the Scala and Haskell meetups.

But that brings me to my thoughts on keeping the Scala meetups going. I
probably was pretty transparent about this, but my interest in the Scala group
was mostly about the following:

- abstraction and modularity
- type-checked FP
- hiring people

For me personally, I think I'll get richer discussions on abstraction,
modularity, type-checking, and FP from a Haskell-oriented meetup. My team is
still using Scala professionally, but I'm finding my Haskell studies are
improving my Scala programming more than my Scala studies are improving my
Haskell programming. Avoiding things like side-effects and variance seems to
amplify this.

I'm struggling to abandon the Scala meetup completely, though. I think it's
safe to say that there's more Scala professional work in town than there in
Haskell, so it's nice to network to help people hire talent.

I have a lot of interest in putting together a presentation on the expression
problem. There would probably be examples in Haskell, Scala, Clojure, and
Java. Also, I think we can get Jason Baldridge to show something related to
his NLP work. But I'm not sure how much more energy I'll have for Scala beyond
that.

Does anyone else have any thoughts? Would someone like to take the reigns to
organize the Scala meetup more directly? I'm really open to suggestions.

Otherwise, I hope you all enjoyed the meetups we had last year.

Thanks for all your support,
Sukant