Sat, 15 Nov 2008

FP-Syd #9.

On the Thursday night just passed was the 9th meeting of FP-Syd, the Sydney Functional Programming group. We had about 30 people show up at the Sydney offices of Thoughtworks.

First up we had Jeeva Suresh talking about the "The Nix Language", the purely functional language behind the Nix package manager. Normal package managers like Debian apt system, operate on the global state of the system, mutating that global state as packages are added and removed. There are a couple of papers on the NixOS web site explaining it further.

The second presentation was by Thomas Sewell and was titled "Functional Programming : What does it mean?". Tom started off reviewing what it was functional programmers like about functional programming and suggested that a lot of it was to do with its connection to mathematics. He then went on to talk about theorem provers, in particular Isabelle and finished off by doing a live proof that the merge sort algorithm terminates and is correct. The audience was suitably impressed.

This was our first meeting at Thoughtworks and I'd like to extend a huge thanks to Nick Carroll, Raphael Speyer and Thoughtworks the organisation.

Posted at: 10:14 | Category: FP-Syd | Permalink