Fri, 18 Jul 2008
FP-Syd #5.
Last night was the 5th meeting of FP-Syd, the Sydney Functional Programming group. The turnout was down a bit (19 people) but I suspect that was due to World Imaginary Friend Day (which for some reason seems to run for a week) clogging up Sydney's streets and public transport system.
The first talk was given by the author of this blog and was titled "Ocaml and Unix.select". I'll be blogging this in more detail some time over the weekend.
Next up we had Ben Lippmeier, author of the Disciple compiler on his entry into the ICFP Programming Contest. In the long tradition of eating one's own dog food, Ben used his DDC compiler to write his entry and ran into a nasty intermittent bug in his compiler's run time. Despite the bug he still managed to put together a pretty decent solution to a rather interesting problem.
As usual, we had post-meeting drinks at the Redoak hotel. Thanks to Shane, James, the other Googlers and Google itself for use of Google's excellent facilities.
Posted at: 18:08 | Category: FP-Syd | Permalink
Fri, 06 Jun 2008
FP-Syd #4.
Last night was the 4th meeting of FP-Syd, the Sydney Functional Programming group. First up I'd like to thank Shane, James and the other Googlers who organised the use of one of Google's Sydney meeting rooms and laid on drinks and a bunch of tasty snacks. Another big thanks goes to our speakers for the evening and the 32 (!!!) people who showed up.
Unfortunately one of our planned speakers for the night had to drop out at the last minute. This meant that as people arrived I was asking them if anyone had a short talk they could give at very short notice. The thing that impressed me the most was that we got two offers.
First up we had Sean Seefried talk about using Ocaml at Nicta to write Nicta's Goanna static type checking tool for C and C++ code. It was interesting that they were using an existing commercial C and C++ parser and the converting the C abstract syntax tree (AST) produced to an Ocaml AST where they work on it further. Also interesting was that the chose Ocaml because it was a good language for writing compilers as well as having reasonably good and highly predictable performance. This was an excellent talk considering that Sean had about 10 minutes to prepare. Thanks Sean.
The next speaker was Scott Kilpatrick who also had about 10 minutes to prepare as well as being our first international speaker. Scott has just recently completed two B.S. degrees (one in Computer Science, the other in Mathematics) from the University of Texas at Austin and will be starting a Masters there in September. He's is currently interning at Google here in Sydney working on the Google Maps project.
Scott gave us a very interesting introduction to SUN's Fortress language. Scott is working on implementing the type checking system for the Fortress compiler rather than being a dedicated user of the language. He was however able to give us a brief overview of the language, which is designed to replace Fortran in high performance computation tasks. Fortress seems to have a huge array of interesting features and is definitely something to keep an eye on. Thanks Scott.
Finally we had Tim Docker speaking about writing a Tuple Server in Haskell using the State Transactional Memory monads in concurrent Haskell. Tim did a great job explaining what Tuple Servers are and what they are used for where he works at Maquarie Bank. He then talked about the monads in Haskell, in particular the STM monad and its use in his tuple space server. It was a great talk and I mid way through it, I realised that a tuple space server is a nice solution to an architectural problem I have. Thanks Tim.
After the talks we retired to the Redoak hotel for a few beers and a chat. Since a couple of people had missed the previous meeting, Ben Lippmeier, was kind enough to pull out his laptop and give his talk on "The Disciplined Disciple Compiler" again. Interestingly for me, he went into a little more detail on areas that he glossed over in the last meeting. DDC is a really interesting piece of work, being a strictly evaluated dialect of Haskell, with optional lazy evaluation (far more elegant than the way Ocaml does it) and with side effects and destructive updates looked after in the type system. The ideas behind DDC are really compelling. I look forward to seeing it progress. Thanks Ben.
Posted at: 22:18 | Category: FP-Syd | Permalink
Fri, 18 Apr 2008
FP-Syd #3.
Wow! Just Wow! I've just arrived home after another FP-Syd meeting.
First up we had Jeremy Apthorp with a short talk titled "My Favourite Bugs (that don't exist in functional languages)". Jeremy gave us all a good reminder of why we were all there. It was also a good warm up the second talk.
Ben Lippmeier, gave us a talk titled "The Disciplined Disciple Compiler" which is something he's working on as part of his PhD at Australian National University. Ben's DDC is a compiler for a Haskell dialect named Disciple that uses effect typing to deal with issues like side effects and destructive updates. Unlike Haskell, Disciple is strictly evaluated with optional, explicit lazy evaluation. This was a really thought provoking talk. Thanks Ben.
I would also like to send out a big thanks to Tom and Scott of Atlassian's Sydney office for providing the venue.
After the meeting we headed off the to Readoak hotel for beers and more FP discussion. By 10:30pm we were just about to leave the Redoak when I ran into Damana who used to work at bCODE and who had organized Sydney Geek Girl get together that same night.
Posted at: 00:44 | Category: FP-Syd | Permalink
Thu, 27 Mar 2008
FP-Syd #2.
Tonight was the second meeting of fp-syd, the Sydney functional programming group. We had a much more focused group this time with 24 attendees.
First up I gave a short talk on a data structure I had come up with for handling data in a text editor. This data structure was very much inspired by the book, "Purely Functional Data Structures" by Chris Okasaki. All data in the data structure is treated as immutable which means that it is very easy to store past state and to implement undo / redo.
The main talk was split into two parts. First up Manuel Chakravarty gave a talk titled "Monads are Not Scary" and he gave us all an excellent introduction to the topic which I'm pretty sure has convinced all the monad skeptics in the room that monads really aren't anything to be afraid of.
The second part of the main talk, was presented by André Pang who built on Manuel's monad introduction and covered Haskell's Parsec monadic parser combinator library. This too was an excellent talk which explained what seems to be a really elegant tool.
Since the group this week was well over 20 people, we are going to have to look for a bigger venue. Dave Peterson of Orbitec has been a great host for the last two meetings and we would sincerely like to thank him for making his offices available for this bunch of crazy people.
Posted at: 11:54 | Category: FP-Syd | Permalink
Thu, 28 Feb 2008
Inaugural Meeting of FP-Syd.
Tonight was the inaugural meeting of fp-syd, the Sydney functional programming group. Here's a somewhat blurry (sorry, my bad) picture of the attendees.
Across the back from left to right we have; Eric, Ben, Ondrej, Dave, Manuel, Rahul, Shane, André and Ben. At the front, left to right we have Sean, Scott, James and Erik.
I think the night was an absolutely rip roaring success. We met at about 6:30, we each gave an approximately 10 minute each intro of ourselves and our interests in functional program. The meeting then evolved into a general discussion and then at about 8:30 we moved on to Bazaar Beer Cafe for a beer.
Thanks to everyone who attended. It was a huge buzz and I look forward to meeting on a regular basis.
![[operator<< is not my friend]](http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/images/operator.png)
