On April 19th, I spent the day at LambdaConf, a local conference focused on functional programming topics. The organizer John DeGoes put together a great team of volunteers and the whole schedule ran without any issues from my perspective. I was very much inexperienced with the functional programming paradigm, and my brain had the sensation of melting near the end of the day. Given that perspective, I’ll spare everyone any uninformed analysis.
Since then, I could not find a central location for reviewing the talks and GitHub repositories, including the main conference page. So for my own reference, here’s an incomplete list of resources pulled from various tweets, itineraries and Google searches:
Events Attended
The Silent Productivity Killer by Paul Phillips:
Keynote slides
Conference started off with a keynote by the controversial Paul Phillips
about the state of build times for the Scala compiler.
Unfortunately, the slides do not convey the amusingly heated shouting and arm-waving about the same.
I did find another talk of his with a similar sentiment here.
Intro to Functional Game Programming with Scala by John Degoes:
Tutorial
As an FP newbie, I appreciated this workshop the most.
We went over this same tutorial,
and it was really helpful to have John DeGoes present to answer questions and perform a live coding demonstration.
We didn’t make it to the end,
but I remember monads coming into the picture over and over again.
That repetition actually helped my absorbing the concept, if only a bit at a time.
Macros, Modules, and Languages in Racket by Matthew Flatt:
Workshop repository
Monads: Why Should You Care? by Harold Carr:
Talk slides
Building Webapps in Clojure by Ryan Neufeld:
Workshop repository
My impression from the talk was that the Pedestal framework hid much of the underlying behavior.
While handy for accelerating the construction process,
this abstraction made it hard for newbies like me to understand what was happening on the language level,
especially for those not familiar with writing production Clojure applications.
The live coding demonstration was impressive though,
and I wished I knew enough about Clojure to appreciate the resulting example code.
Haskell in 60 minutes by Brian Mckenna:
Gist with the results of Brian’s live coding session
This was actually from a meetup held a month before LamdaConf.
My own notes from the live coding session turned into a mess by the end of the hour,
so it was helpful to have a definitive gist written by someone who knew what he was actually doing.
Missed Events
Idris workshop by Brian Mckenna:
Talk slides
Workshop sample code
The topic of the talk (dependently typed programming) was fairly intimidating,
given my limited exposure to Haskell and even mainstream functional programming.
From hearsay, this was apparently the best event of the conference.
(This workshop will be making a comeback in 2015 - Time Travelling Ed)
How to Write a Perfect Program by Kris Nuttycombe
Talk slides
Complexity and Reasoning in Functional Programming by Kris Nuttycombe:
Workshop repository
Scala Pattern Matching in Depth by Derek Chen-Becker:
Workshop repository
Functional Web Application with Purescript by Phil Freeman:
Talk slides
Workshop repository
Misc Notes
Rob Norris has a great writeup of all the events I couldn’t attend due to the multiple tracks.