BFPG Monthly Meetup - FP in Education and Purebred project update

Functional Programming in Education - George Wilson

This talk looks at how functional programming has been used in tertiary education, and how it could be used in the future. In 1985, Abelson and Sussman's course Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs made enduring contributions to the art of educating programmers. How to Design Programs later refined some of these ideas, with a new emphasis on decomposing problems and designing solutions. I argue further improvements could be made. In particular, by using a typed functional programming language like Haskell.

This talk will suggest approaches and recommend resources that could be used in the modern education of undergraduate programmers. Such recommendations are also applicable to industry programmers looking to learn functional programming or organisations looking to develop internal training material.

Purebred project update - Fraser Tweedale

purebred is a terminal mail program (MUA) based on the notmuch mail indexer. Fraser will give an overview of the project and report on the progress over the last 6 months, and what's ahead.