Domain Specific Languages: Hands on! with Tomas Petricek

In software development, we often face the same problem over and over again. For example, when designing user-interfaces, we need to specify the layout of components; when designing financial systems, we need to detect various patterns in changing prices. The Domain Specific Language (DSL) approach is to design a language for the specific problem domain and then use it repeatedly to solve multiple instances of the same problem.

In the talk-part of the meetup, we look how to think about DSLs in a functional way. This lets us focus on the domain. Rather than worrying about the syntax, we start by understanding what problems we actually want to model and what is the best way to do so. Along the way, I’ll show three DSLs – for composing 3D objects, for working with Markdown documents and for detecting live price patterns.

In the hands-on part of the meetup, you’ll get to use and extend the DSL of your choice. Do you want to create some 3D fractals using F# and add animation? Or do you want to process and render Markdown documents? Bring your laptop with Windows, Mac or Linux and F# installed – just follow the guide on http://www.fsharp.org !

The Speaker

Tomas Petricek is a long-time F# enthusiast, regular speaker at F# and .NET events, founding member of the F# Foundation (http://fsharp.org/), Microsoft MVP and author of the book Real-World Functional Programming ( http://manning.com/petricek ). He leads functional programming and F# courses in London and New York and contributed to the development of F# as an intern and contractor at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. He is a PhD student at University of Cambridge, working on functional programming languages. You can find Tomas on Twitter as @tomaspetricek (http://twitter.com/tomaspetricek), and his blog at tomasp.net (http://tomasp.net/).

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Food and drinks will be available, courtesy of our awesome meeting sponsor Tachyus (www.tachyus.com) (http://www.tachyus.com)!