Sat, 23 Aug 2008

FP-Syd #6.

Last night was the 6th meeting of FP-Syd, the Sydney Functional Programming group with 24 people attending.

The first presentation was by James Kozianski titled "Evaluators and Higher Order Abstract Syntax". James showed that when using a language like Scheme (or LISP) where code and data are both stored as S expressions, that abstract syntax tree of an embedded DSL can actually be encoded in the host language's own data structures. This is rather a neat trick and it was great to see a presentation in Scheme. Thanks James.

David Hearnden gave the second presentation titled "Deltaware: Incremental Change Propagation through Model Transformations". He started of explaining Model Driven Engineering, a simple example of which would be generating database schema from the definition of a set of classes/objects. The problem that David's presentation covered was how to deal with changes to the original classes/objects that need to be propagated to the database schema. He then showed how logic programming languages provided a solution to this problem that functional (and imperative) languages did not (ignoring the possibility of Greenspunning logic language features into a functional language). This was a very thought provoking presentation. Thanks David.

I'd also like to thank Google and the Google employees who helped make this meeting happen. We will be having one more meeting at Google before moving on to Thoughtworks' Sydney office for a block of four meetings.

Posted at: 08:34 | Category: FP-Syd | Permalink