Next FP Syd: 25th October

[Tim McGilchrist]

FP-SYD is back with two talks in October, from Clinton Mead and Andre Marques Lee. Abstracts below.

As usual, doors open at 6pm for the talk to start around 6:45. Please RSVP on meetup or get in touch.

If you'd like to present something Functional Programming related get in touch with the organisers or open a PR on http://github.com/fp-syd/meetings. We are always on the lookout for new speakers.

Adaptive arithmetic - Clinton Mead

Multiplication is both associative and commutative, which means the order of operations does not affect the result. But it may affect performance. Consider 2 * 3 * 456789? Would you multiply 2 * 3 first or 3 * 456789? There is an analogous situation for the runtime performance of machine multiplication when the integers involved are larger than a single machine word. Reordering multiplications can produce an orders of magnitude performance difference, as quadratic performance can be reduced to closer to O(n^1.5)/O(n*log(n)). However to take advantage of this one needs to carefully reorder arithmetic operations in your algorithm, complicating the code. I will present a custom Haskell data type, that implements "Num", that instead does this reordering adaptively at runtime, resulting in drop in performance gains without requiring a significant change in code.

DSLs to get us out of the tarpit - Andre Marques Lee 

Once past the initial hurdles of learning a functional language, new functional programmers are often keen to repeat the successes that they had with object orientation. They want to learn about standard practices, design patterns, and mindsets that can help them write "scalable" functional code. This talk aims to foster those good intentions by exploring some of the motivations and mindsets behind successful object-oriented software design, and distils some aspects that translate well into scalable functional software design. To do so, the talk draws heavy inspiration from material presented in "Out of the Tar Pit", by Ben Mosely and Peter Marks (February 2006).The DSL is presented as an important tool to aid in quality functional software design, and several example design strategies for DSLs are presented. Correlations are drawn between some well-known functional programming DSLs and equally popular object-oriented design patterns.Software design examples are presented in Haskell, but most translate to other general-purpose functional programming languages.

[Paul A. Steckler]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 4:38 PM Tim McGilchrist <timm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> FP-SYD is back with two talks in October, from Clinton Mead and Andre Marques Lee. Abstracts below.

Are FP-SYD talks on YouTube, or are there live feeds via Zoom or Google Meet?

Thanks for any info ...

-- Paul