Next Melbourne Compose meeting 6pm Thursday Nov 21st at Kathleen Syme Centre: Viktor Dukhovni on Streaming in Haskell

[Ben Hutchison]

Hi all,

Our next, and probably final Melbourne Compose meeting for 2024 will be held at 6-8pm on Thursday Nov 21st in Activity Room 2 of the Kathleen Syme Centre in Carlton [https://maps.app.goo.gl/FHXCeHMHXhiXBuRJ7].

The topic of the evening will be libraries and API for streaming computations in Haskell, led by Viktor Dukhovni.

Victor is a longstanding contributor to many libraries in the Haskell ecosystem. We can also credit him for the detailed documentation available for the Traversable typeclass [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.20.0.1/docs/Data-Traversable.html#g:4]. He is co-author of RFC7672, SMTP Security via Opportunistic DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities. 

In my view, the power of effectful Stream-based programming comes from its ability to abstract over several longstanding boundaries that have traditionally been difficult:

1. Between small collections of data that readily fit into memory, versus large or even infinite collections that do not 
2. Between modelling events that have already happened, versus events that may happen in future (such as a stream of mouse movements)

Older programming approaches typically require differently structured  APIs to handle the different cases, whereas streams give us a single abstraction sufficiently flexible to apply in all these cases.

As always, newcomers most welcome. Reach me on 0407 990 094 on the night if you have any issues finding the venue.

Hope to see you there,

-Ben

[Viktor Dukhovni]

Thanks for the discussion yesterday, here's a link to the slides, the material will be easier to digest at your own if that's appealing.