17 Jan 2012

[Richard Dallaway]

Happy new year.

My calendar tells me we're due another Functional Brighton meet-up on
Tuesday, and I assume the Skiff is still booked for us.

What shall we do? Any ideas?

One topic I've been wondering about is "why types might be
interesting". I don't mean the helping hand the compiler gives you, I
mean more along the lines of how funky features are useful. Or are
they? Are type classes the answer to everything as the Clojure guy
suggests.

So that's one idea. I have no material, and I'm only on page 40 of
TAPL (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/)

Or maybe just "type classes in N languages". Starting with what the
heck are type classes.

Ok, I'm now just in total stream of consciousness mode. Over to you...
what shall we do?

[Kingsley Davies]

Hey Richard,

Happy New Year and great idea too !

There's still a thought about doing something for functional web frameworks:

http://www.meetup.com/Functional-Brighton/events/34456662/ 

But I'm also intrigued by type classes. What do some of those weird type signatures I see in methods mean ? What is doable in type classes, (i.e. what on Earth is type level programming:  http://apocalisp.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/type-level-programming-in-scala/ ). Are there actually benefits here, and how can you be functional in a dynamically typed language ? I also hear a lot about types as a design and documentation tool (the types are the documentation), is it just people who hate documentation who say this though ;-) ?

As you can tell, I'm more questions than answers, (plus I'm starting to ramble now). I'm just (re)starting with TAPL too !

Great idea for a topic with lots of depth and rabbit holes to look into !

k

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[Miles Sabin]

Hi folks,

Mea culpa for not getting anything sorted ... :-(

I must admit, I'd assumed that it was a bit late to try and get
anything together for next Tuesday and that it'd be better to try
again for February ... but if people would like to get together, even
just for a beer, then let's do it :-)

Unsurprisingly I can talk about type classes and type level
computation in Scala until the cows come home (believe it or not, I
have the Scala compiler trying to prove that 2^5 == 3*10+2 as I'm
typing this ;-), but I think it'd be better if we had contributions
for other languages. Eric?

Cheers,

Miles

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[Eric Kow]

Happy New Year all!

I've logged ideas so far on https://github.com/functionalbrighton/Functional-Fun/wiki/Ideas

Type classes sounds great for the next one.

I can never remember all the little bits and pieces that make me enthusiastic about them as opposed to say interfaces in Java :-)

On 11 Jan 2012, at 21:21, Kingsley Davies wrote:

> Hey Richard,
>
> Happy New Year and great idea too !
>
> There's still a thought about doing something for functional web frameworks:

--
Eric Kow <http://erickow.com>

[Miles Sabin]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 9:32 PM, Eric Kow <eric...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Happy New Year all!

Likewise!

> I've logged ideas so far on https://github.com/functionalbrighton/Functional-Fun/wiki/Ideas

Good stuff :-)

> Type classes sounds great for the next one.
>
> I can never remember all the little bits and pieces that make me enthusiastic about them as opposed to say interfaces in Java :-)

Are you able to make it for next Tuesday?

Cheers,

Miles

[Eric Kow]

> Are you able to make it for next Tuesday?

I can make it, but I can't promise to prepare.

I can also bring some Haskell books to pass around if anybody wants to borrow them.

[Thomas Parslow]

Have fun guys! It's my ladyfriend's birthday that day so I won't be able to make it :(

--

Thomas Parslow
Freelance Developer
Django, Python, Javascript and more!

http://almostobsolete.net
+44 (0) 7951261227
@almostobsolete

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