MEETING: Monday, October 14th, 7pm at Janrain

[Leif]

The September meeting of the Portland Functional Programming Study Group is a little over a week away. Do you have a
presentation, quick talk, discussion topic or a burning question about
functional programming? This is a great opportunity to share FP knowledge and
meet other practitioners and enthusiasts.

VENUE: We'll be meeting at Janrain Headquarters, 519 SW 3rd Ave, 4th floor baskell ball court, Portland, OR 97204. This meeting's venue is kindly sponsored by
Janrain <http://www.janrain.com/>, providers of hosted user management
solutions for social login and sharing, single sign-on and social
profile storage.

ABOUT THE GROUP: Join programmers, researchers and enthusiasts to
discuss functional programming. pdxfunc is a study/user group
exploring the world of functional programming, based in Portland,
Oregon. The group welcomes programmers interested in all functional
languages, including Haskell, Erlang, OCaml, Lisp, Clojure, Oz, Agda, Idris, and others. The
group meets regularly for presentations, demos and discussions
applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. The meetings
are usually on the second Monday of the month.

[Bart Massey]

Anybody got an agenda? I assume we are actually meeting? I can give a very brief

presentation on a tiny problem I ran into and we can play Haskell golf with it...

On Sunday, October 6, 2013 11:28:41 PM UTC-7, Leif wrote:

The September [actually October] meeting of the Portland Functional Programming 

[Jake Brownson]

That sounds like fun.

If there's nothing else I just finished another milestone on my
project I've presented a couple of times now. I was hoping to get a
bit farther before presenting again, but I could show it now I
suppose.

Any of those Erlang folks want to show something this month? Last minute I know.

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--
Jake Brownson
Cofounder
Brainium Studios
Skype: jake.brownson
Cell: 503.349.4841

[Jake Brownson]

I should describe it for those that haven't seen it. It's a purely
functional reactive programming "language" built on top of c++ (the
previous iteration I demoed was built on top of Java using MPS).

I have a working GUI program written using it, and I can print out
pretty graph visualizations of programs.

[Kevin Scaldeferri]

I can give a recap of CUFP.

[Jake Brownson]

That sounds cool

[Jim Snow]

Here's an open question; maybe there's enough interest to have a constructive discussion:

One question that comes up from time to time in functional programming circles is, what would it be like to write a UNIX-like operating system in a functional language?  There is a similar question that for some reason doesn't seem to come up, which is, what if one were to use lessons learned from functional programming to design an operating system interface that is safer, more powerful, or more elegant than what POSIX provides?  What would it look like?

Some examples of annoyances I have with POSIX that I believe are solvable:

- File system access isn't transactional.  If I want a certain shell script to either complete successfully or do nothing, that's really hard to do.

- Files and programs could have explicit types.  POSIX basically treats everything as type [Char], and it's quite easy to accidentally pipe incorrectly formatted data from one program to another.

- It ought to be possible to distinguish a program that acts as a pure function (i.e. it reads from stdin and writes to stdout and nothing else) from a program which has side effects.

I think it's at least interesting that a lot of features that have been added to Linux over the years could be seen as gravitating towards a functional interface.  For instance, copy-on-write is just another way of saying that you're dealing with a persistent data structure.  RCU seems awfully similar to STM.

Even hardware is in some ways gravitating towards being more functional-programming friendly.  SSDs, for instance, don't mutate disk blocks in place.

[Tom Harke]

It seems the important distinction is not pure vs effectful, since a lot of interaction w/ the o/s is effectful. The important distinction is whether the effect is to observe the system or modify the system.  You won't get into trouble typing '!ls', but you always have to think hard before you type '!rm' .  IIRC, Lutz Schröder et al have characterized the difference for monadic computations.

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Tom Harke
tom....@acm.org

[Jake Brownson]

Yeah this could go interesting places. OSs have so much strong legacy
in them that we forget just how poorly designed the whole thing is for
today's users in many ways. The idea of a filesystem is pretty awful
really. This morass of bits with dots in their names and a few strange
bits of metadata for each one. I wonder how MS's attempt at a database
filesystem WinFS would fit into the argument. Did it fail because it's
a bad idea, or for some other reason? iOS and Android have filesystems
under the hood, but especially on iOS the user and even application
model is much more restrictive than it has been historically.

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 2:05 PM, Jim Snow <rayinte...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Stephen Peters]

Perhaps iOS is more restrictive for security reasons?  Mobile devices so far seem to have been largely free of virus and malware issues.

- Stephen Peters
- stephen...@gmail.com

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