Domain Specific Languages, the functional way

6:30 to 7:00 pm "n00b Presentation" - TBD

Who: Tomas Petricek is a long-time F# enthusiast, Microsoft MVP and author of a book Real-World Functional Programming ( http://manning.com/petricek ). He leads functional programming and F# courses in London and New York and contributed to the development of F# as an intern and contractor at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. He is a PhD student at University of Cambridge, working on functional programming languages.

Main Session 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

What: In software development, we often face the same problem over and over again. For example, when designing user-interfaces, we need to specify the layout of components; when designing financial systems, we need to detect various patterns in changing prices. The Domain Specific Language (DSL) approach is to design a language for the specific problem domain and then use it repeatedly to solve multiple instances of the same problem.

In this talk, we look how to think about DSLs in a functional way. This lets us focus on the domain. Rather than worrying about the syntax, we start by understanding what problems we actually want to model and what is the best way to do so. Along the way, we’ll look at three fun examples ranging from a language for building 3D objects to a language for detecting price change patterns.

Get ready for some live coding in F#, but don’t worry if you have not done much F# before! You can use the ideas from this talk in any programming language and I’ll introduce all the necessary F# along the way.

Pizza and Raffled off prizes for the attendees

Where: B-Line Medical is located 2 blocks south of the Dupont Circle metro stop (red line). Exit on dupont south and the building is at the corner of 19th and N street NW. Driving is not encouraged as parking will be extremely difficult. The building needs a key card to get in after 6pm but Riccardo and Khiem will be hanging around outside to let people in. B-Line medical is on the first floor of the building right around the corner at the end of the hallway.

Can't make it? We'll be recording our meetup and posting it to our youtube