Functional Programming with Actors!

After a long Summer Break, Belfast Functional Programming meetup is returning with a new theme for the coming season! Come along and bring a friend or two to share to FP <3 with.

Our November 7th Meetup will be hosted in Instil, we will explore using FP with the Actor Model and will be a joint meetup with our friends at Belfast Elixir! After the talks, we will write some code to solve a small problem fitting with the theme of the evening.

## Start Time and Access to Venue

The event will start at 7:00 PM but will encourage people to arrive around 6:30-6:50 PM when there will be someone available to provide access to the venue.

# NEWBIE FRIENDLY

Never written a line of code in a functional language?
No Problem!

Ever wondered what all the fuss is about regarding FP?
Then this is the meetup for you.

Please come along feel free to ask lots of questions and if you like you can always pair up with one of the experienced FP devs who will show you the ropes during the coding challenges!

# A NEW YEAR - A NEW THEME

In the past we have had themes "FP from first principles", "FP Languages and their Eco-systems" and this year we are looking to expand on this theme to focus on the practical aspects of system design: "Designing and Building systems with Functional Languages".

The overall goal is to arm our attendees with enough knowledge to be able to design and implement complete systems using functional programming languages - whilst highlighting the positives of opting for a functional language as well as demystifying some of the FP concepts along the way.

We will be tackling everything from common practical tasks such as building web apps, working with DBs and using functional languages on the front-end - to other areas such as the implementation of Domain Specifical Languages, Formally Verified Business Logic, Implementing Common Enterprise Integration Patterns etc.

We are asking our community to come up with ideas in this space, volunteer to share their knowledge and come up with fun programming problems within the context of this theme that we can work on together at the meetups.

Your feedback on this is very welcome - drop us a message and tell us what you would like to see discussed.

With that in mind the theme of our first evening will be:

# FP + ACTORS! - Decomposing & Distributing Computation in FP Systems

In our November 7th Meetup we will be exploring "Functional Programming and the Actor Model" looking at various platforms and how to incorporate the tenets of Message Passing, No Shared State, Concurrency and Seamless Distribution.

We will start the evening with some short talks on:

1. "Share Nothing Gain Everything / OOP and the illusion of Encapsulation" (with examples in Elixir) - @holsee

2. Demystifying Cloud Haskell - @sigma

3. Got something you would like to present for 10-15 mins? - Please Volunteer

# Coding Challenge

After the talks, we will encourage attendees to work together to solve a small problem using a Function Language leveraging the Actor Model.
(Bring your Laptops!)

For those who are new to the group, know that although we endeavour to have talks each month, the core focus of the group is meetup regularly to discuss FP and work on some actual code.

We then share what we have done at the end of the evening so we may all learn from each other and see how the same problem was solved using different functional languages.

## The Challenge: TBD - will be posted here soon.
Hint: It will be something to do with FP and Actors :D

# Post Meetup Drinks

As is customary we will be popping to the woodworkers after the meet-up to chat about all things FP and have a couple of pints.