A taste of APL with John Scholes

Brace yourselves. For this workshop, we're going to try our hands at coding in APL!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/APL-keybd2.svg/600px-APL-keybd2.svg.png

If you have an APL keyboard or typeball now is your time to shine... (Seriously though, you'll just need your laptop -- promise!)

John Scholes blew our minds by showing us the solution to some katas in APL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)) in the past. This venerable language invented in the 60s has been an important historical influence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming#History) in the development of functional programming. It's also very well suited to solving programming puzzles! John is back in Dublin for a few days and has agreed to run a workshop to teach us some APL basics, and help us solve some basic problems together.

We're once again generously hosted by Zalando Ireland. Food and drinks will be provided.

Schedule

18.30 Doors open
19.00 Intro to APL and the TryAPL REPL (http://tryapl.org/)
19.20 Pair on some problems
20.20 Show and compare solutions
21.00 We get kicked out of the venue and head out to the pub

Prerequisites

This workshop is open to beginners, no special knowledge of functional programming is required. Remember to bring your laptop!