Haskell in the Financial District & Building a LISP Machine

Note the new location!

Thanks to Suncorp for offering us this amazing venue, for covering the real costs of keeping the lights and air conditioning on, and especially to Steve McCormick, Richard Glew, Rob Manthey and Craig Smith for making this happen.

External doors will lock at about 5.45pm, so try to be in by that time. If you do get stuck outside, call Matt on 0431 926 131.

Haskell in the Financial District: an Experience Report

Sam Roberts

An informal session where Sam will discuss his experience working for Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore, where he used Haskell for all sorts of things, from throw-away scripts, through powerful build systems, and all the way up to a one-million line quantitative analysis platform. There will be plenty of time for questions.

Sam has been interested in functional programming for quite a few years, and has given a couple of talks at BFPG. When he saw a position open up at Standard Chartered Bank, he couldn't resist. After 18 months in the Singapore financial district, he's brought his family home, and we're excited to hear about his experiences!

Sam has requested that this talk NOT be recorded, so if you want to hear about his experiences, make sure you come along!

Building a LISP Machine

Carlo Hamalainen

A great way to learn a programming language is to write a compiler for it. Carlo will show how to implement a virtual machine emulator for a stack machine and then write a compiler for a mini-Lisp language that targets the stack machine. The mini-Lisp language is a pure functional language as it has no destructive variable updates. Along the way he'll explain some Lisp folklore and reflect on non-Von Neumann architectures and actual hardware implementations of these architectures.

Prerequisites: Some familiarity with Python syntax, lambda expressions and basic data structures (lists and stacks).

Carlo works on cloud computing solutions at the University of Queensland. When he isn't doing functional programming, he likes relaxing with a home brew and reading periodicals like The Idler.