Mon, 28 Jun 2010

FP-Syd #25.

On Thursday June 17th, we held the 25th meeting of the Sydney Functional Programming group. The meeting was held at Google's Sydney offices and we about 20 people show up to hear our two presenters.

First up we had Eric Torreborre on the subject of Specs a Scala library designed as an alternative to JUnit for testing Scala and Java projects. Specs seems to remove a lot of the boilerplate normall associated with unit testing.

Our second presenter for the evening was Shane Stephens who presented on the subject of Arrows, a generalisation of Monads. Shane's presentation was originally scheduled to be a 5-7 minute lightning talk but due to a lack of other lightning presenters, Shane managed to pad it out to a full talk in the hour before he presented. According to Shane, his presentation was based quite closely on the original paper "Generalising Monads to Arrows" by John Hughes.

A big thanks to Eric and Shane for presenting and Google for providing the meeting venue and refreshments.

Posted at: 18:08 | Category: FP-Syd | Permalink