React R'dam 2019 edition. How does code sound and more.

Hi folks!

Hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year holidays. We are going to start this 2019 with the meetup featuring Felienne Hermans and Michel Weststrate.

Schedule is as follows:

18.00: Dinner (halal and vegan options are going to be available)

19.00: How does code sound - Felienne Hermans (@Felienne)

We study all sorts of aspects of programming languages, their ease of use, type system, their level of abstractness, but we feel one aspect is overlooked, how a programming language sounds like when read aloud. Is reading aloud hard? Well, yes. We found that developers cannot pronounce code in a consistent fashion. We had 25 experienced developers read code aloud, and it was a mess, even for simple statements. For example, how to pronounce an assignment statement like x = 5? Is it "x is 5"? Or "set x to 5"? Or "x gets 5"? And what about an equality check? Is it "if x is is 5"? Or "if x is 5"? Or "is x is equal to 5"? What can we learn from reading code aloud? We think programming language designers could learn a lot from hearing their language spoken. For example, if programmers consistently read if x == 5 as "if x is 5", = or even is might be better keyword. What is the ultimate end game of this idea? We envision programming language designers of the future to prescribe a way that their language sounds, much like languages have style guides. When the sound or 'phonology' is defined, it can be practiced, taught and analyzed. This will be useful while learning to program, but could be a valuable tool people that interact with code in an oral way, such as visually and physically disabled programmers, and developers that are doing (remote) pair programming. What will the talk cover? In the talk, we will describe our experiment and what we learned from it, so other interested in exploring how languages sound can start well-prepared and informed.

20:00 The Fun of run-time type systems - Michel Weststrate (@mweststrate)

The React prop-types package is a simple runtime type system that is used for property validation. But runtime type systems can do many more things than just data validation. Because they are very flexible (as you can basically reuse the entire hosting language to express your types) it will be much less likely that you will run into structures that cannot be expressed in the type system. You can generate runtime types on the fly from other sources (json-schema, graphql etc) or compose them together.

In this talk I will walk you through some runtime type systems, like prop-types, tcomb and mobx-state-tree. But also show you how runtime- and compile-time typesystems like TypeScript or Flow can co-exist and leverage each other.

If you thought so far Higher Order Components or render callbacks where cool, in this talk I will show you that these patterns can be applied in general to any datastructure you have.

20.30: Beers!

N.B: Mendix has moved to a new office, in the "De Rotterdam", so we are at a different location now! Take the entrance after the NH hotel entrance (same one as the municipality), then take the elevator in the back of the hall to the 5th floor