Getting started with FP and hygienic macro expanders!

Come to our pre-Strangeloop meeting with local speakers presenting their talks early to us! We have something for everyone this month with an introductory FP talk and a more advanced talk on hygienic macro expanders!

6:00 - 6:30pm Introductions and dinner

Please RSVP so we can arrange for the dinner. It will probably be Village Baker pizza.

Dinner is sponsored by Savvysherpa

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/6/2/2/a/event_434725130.jpeg

Through research and prototyping, Savvysherpa plays the role of secret weapons lab for enterprise clients in a range of industries. Whether we're tuning wearable sensors to impact health outcomes or honing predictive models to improve customer experiences, we enjoy a range of interesting and meaningful problems with colleagues from a variety of disciplines.

How to Get Started With Functional Programming by Julia Gao

Functional Programming paradigm produces more reliable and readable code, it also helps us think about the problem at hand more before deciding how to solve it. However, a lot of us got introduced to object oriented programming first, so it can be a pain to switch our mindset into functional programming. I will be talking about some of the concepts in functional programming and how to get started with existing programming knowledge.

About Julia Gao

Julia (https://twitter.com/ryoia) is a software developer at O.C. Tanner, a student pursuing her Computer Science degree, and a conference speaker. She likes to learn more about functional programming, and is currently learning Haskell.

Let's Build a Hygienic Macro Expander by Matthew Flatt

Although the idea of hygienic macro expansion appeals to many programmers, the details of hygienic expansion have scared away many language implementors. In fact, in the same way that lexical scope used to seem exotic and difficult to implement compared to dynamic scope---at least, until its implementation via closures became widely understood---the extra dimension of "macro scope" can seem mysterious. Historically, dynamic scope seemed obvious, because it involves a linear sequence of bindings, while lexical scope demands an implementation that matches the two-dimensional nature of nested expressions. Macro scope demands yet another dimension to binding.

This talk aims to dispel the mystery of hygienic expansion: first, through a new explanation of macro scope based on "scopes sets"; and second, by walking through the implementation of a macro expansion using scope-sets.

About Matthew Flatt

Matthew Flatt (http://www.cs.utah.edu/~mflatt) is a professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, where he works on extensible programming languages, run-time systems, and applications of functional programming. He is one of the developers of the Racket programming language.