Using Python as a functional language and other talks

This month our event will feature a couple of talks and will be in a different venue from usual, so please check the location :)

18.30 Food, drink and networking
19.00 Using Python in a functional style, Hakim Cassimally
19.45 Making sense of parsers, Jonathan Stott
20.30 Pub and more networking

Our first talk will be from Hakim Cassimally and is on using Python in a functional programming style to create diagrams. Hakim spent his early career as a developer specialising in Perl, JavaScript, Haskell, and Python, and now works as a technology trainer at the BBC.

While Python works perfectly well as a functional language, this style is much more often associated with ground-up functional languages like Clojure or Haskell, so may be an interesting insight into the way these languages are written, or just a look at a different style with familiar syntax.

Our second talk of the evening will be from Jonathan Stott, who will be making sense of parsers. In this talk, there will be a brief introduction to parsers and why you might want to use them. Then we'll see how to implement a small parser, using the parsimonious library in python.

Jonathan is a senior data scientist working for Manchester airport. He works using a mixture of R and python. He also enjoys going for long walks in the peak district.

There will some food and drink available, so please let us know if you have any dietary requirements. See you there