Next Melbourne Compose meetup Nov 20th: David Overton on The Mercury Programming Language

[Ben Hutchison]

Melbourne Compose is the monthly in-person meetup for functional programmers in Melbourne, every 3rd Thursday of the month in Carlton.

Our November session will be held 5:30-8pm Nov 20th at our regular venue, Activity Room 2 at Kathleen Syme Center in Carlton. Arrive from 5:30 for chat and socialising, talks start around 6:30. (Final meeting for 2025.)

Please RSVP via Luma: https://luma.com/nqg5ckh3

David Overton will be presenting this month, on AFAIK the only programming language that originated here in Melbourne:

The Mercury Programming Language - Logic Programming for the Real World

Mercury is a purely declarative logic programming language that combines the expressive power of Prolog with the strong static typing, purity, and performance guarantees of languages like Haskell.

It was developed at the University of Melbourne over several decades starting in the mid 1990s.

Designed for reliability and efficiency, Mercury introduced a sophisticated mode and determinism system that lets the compiler reason about dataflow and optimize away unnecessary backtracking, producing high-performance native code. 

This talk will introduce Mercury’s core ideas, syntax, and type system, illustrate how it differs from both Haskell and Prolog, and demonstrate how its design was geared towards producing a useful declarative language for "real world" software engineering.

Attendees should come away with an understanding of Mercury's place in the programming landscape, and some appreciation of the goals the project was trying to achieve.

As always, newcomers welcome. Reach Ben on 407 990094 if you have trouble accessing the venue.

Hope to see you there :)
-Ben Hutchison & John Walker

[David Overton]

Thanks everyone for coming tonight. The GitHub repo for my talk slides and sample code is at https://github.com/dmoverton/mercury-talk.  

If anyone's interested I did a talk on writing a constraint solver in Haskell at the Melbourne Haskell Users Group a few years ago. It used the list monad for backtracking and also included a Sudoku solver as a sample application: https://github.com/dmoverton/finite-domain

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