Functional Monthly - Session 2

Welcome to the monthly meetup of people interested in functional javascript and the topics connected to it. We've decided to combine the recently created Functional JS meetup group with the juggernaut SFJS meetup group to help spread the functional style.

We will meet on the last Tuesday of every month. Some of these meetups may get pretty advanced, but we plan to do our best to organize topics for beginners and advanced javascriptors alike.

LOOKING TO PRESENT?
We need speakers for the next two meetups.
June 25 @ 7PM
July 30 @ 7PM
Email Taylor to submit your talk - taylor @ looprecur.com

SPEAKER

Leo Meyerovich

Don’t Call It a Comeback: Big Data Visualization in Superconductor with Attribute Grammars and Parallel JavaScript

We built Superconductor (http://sc-lang.com) to enable us to explore 1 million node data sets, in real-time, and in the browser. This talk will discuss why we needed to build a new approach to visualization and the overall design of Superconductor. The secret sauce is a mix of new and old. First, I will describe how we are achieving 50X+ speedups through the use of several new parallel JavaScript extensions. Second, I will describe how we are enabling a declarative approach to parallel programming by taking a new spin on the functional programming abstraction of attribute grammars, starting with what attribute grammars actually are. This talk assumes basic knowledge of HTML5 and compilers (e.g., what is parsing and an AST), and is designed so that the more you know, the more you will get out of it.

Bio: Leo Meyerovich designs programming languages at UC Berkeley’s Parallel Computing Laboratory. He built Flapjax, the first functional reactive web programming framework, analyzed social foundations of programming languages (Socio-PLT), and his recent thesis work on web browser parallelization led to a several large industrial projects. Today, he is creating the Superconductor language for web-based big data visualization and is looking for challenging problems to throw at it.

CHAT TIME

After our presentation, we'll all be hanging out and chatting about functional programming. Stick around, take off your shoes (don't take off your shoes), and enjoy some casual functional conversations.