Nix a purely functional package manager, and type safety in practice

Our next meetup will take place in Nijmegen, at Lumiguide offices.

Bas van Dijk will talk about the Nix language (and package manager), which is a powerful and useful language for doing DevOps. Several companies using Haskell in production use Nix for achieving reproducible builds.

Nick Van den Broeck will be talking about type-safety in practice, and give an example in the context of neural networks.

The meetup will take place at Lumiguide, but we'll be gathering at Tati (https://www.tati-nijmegen.nl/) for dinner, in case you want to join.

Agenda:

18:00 - Meet at Tati for dinner.
19:30 - Bas van Dijk: Introduction to Nix
20:15 - Nick Van den Broeck: Type-safety in practice

The abstract of Nick's talk is given below:

Using neural networks as an example of a very complex system, we will explore the advantages of using strong type systems. During the talk, it will be argued that the help the compiler can provide to the author as well as the improved API are just as valuable as the well-explored safety benefits.

For more information, check out https://github.com/CSVdB/pinky. Neither Haskell nor neural network experience is required for most of the talk.