In this episode, I talk with Shriram Krishnamurthi. We cover his introduction to functional programming, Racket and #lang, Static vs Dynamic Typing, Bootstrap and Pyret, How to Design Programs, and much, much, more.

Our Guest, Shriram Krishnamurthi

ShriramKMurthi on Twitter
shriram on Github
cs.brown.edu/~sk/ Shriram’s University of Brown Page
parentheticallyspeaking.org Shriram’s Blog/Essays
blog.brownplt.org Brown PLT Blog

Announcements

Strange Loop 2022 is taking place September 23rd and 24th in St. Louis, Missouri. Visit thestrangeloop.com to keep up to date and to register.

RacketCon is back in person for its 12th year. Hosted at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, RacketCon will be October 28th-30th. Visit https://con.racket-lang.org/ for more information.

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@1:31]

Welcome Shriram
Brown University
PLT Scheme Family
How To Design Program
Bootstrap
Pyret
How Shriram got into programming
MIT
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
“From then, it was just like unicorns, and I’ve been in the future ever since.”
Dan Friedman story
Rice University
Matthias Felleisen
Matthew Flatt
Robby Findler
Why Shriram didn’t work with Matthias in Grad School
Bob Harper
Practical Foundations of Programming Languages
Daniel Jackson
Alloy
Moshe Vardi
Dynamic vs. Static Typing and Shriram’s view on Types
Pyret as an optional typing experience
Haskell
Perspectives from a Programmer versus a Verification Person at heart
TeJaS: Retrofitting Type Systems for JavaScript
Gradual Soundness: Lessons from Static Python
“We do not fully understand programmer thought processes.”
“What would happen if we tried to crowd-source language design?”
“Give people the language they want.”
#lang
typed/racket
Plait language
PLAI
Retrofitting types systems onto existing dynamic languages
Rust
Pyret built with types in mind from the beginning
“We want you to live in a rich world of expression, not an impoverished world […] of data types you can count on one hand.”
How To Design Programs
Little Schemer
SICP as a magic trick
“It’s almost like the dual of SICP.”
“Go ahead and type. Let’s see what you can do.”
Making traceability as central as possible
Kathi Fisler
Data-Centric Introduction to Computing
Bootstrap
Emmanuel Schanzer
Trying to introduce computing to school
Using exiting teachers to teach computing in existing disciplines
Teaching students by them creating a video game as a way to teach math
Kathi Fisler’s presentation at LambdaDays 2021
All of Bootstrap’s programming is purely functional
Pyret as a no-research language
Focus on the user experience
“There are teachers that have built up a pedagogy around the use of error messages.”
“I’m left-handed, and I sometimes joke it’s [parenthetical syntaxes] the same sort of thing.”
Building as a language that runs in the browser for zero hassle
WeScheme
Tool and Language Building’s relation to Racket
“If you were deeply conservative, you wouldn’t be using Racket.”
Scribble
LaTeX
“These are the same people who, if their programming language didn’t give them separate compilation, they would just be up in arms.”
Mystery Languages
The Curse of Lisp
The Bipolar Lisp Programmer
“We have lost track of this very foundational fact, that programming is a kind of super-power. It’s the ability to make worlds and to sort-of bend things to our will, that is almost scary.”
Roman Numbers #lang
Racket is a language as a service
FrTime
Translated FrTime to JavaScript, resulting in Flapjax
“Everything is a language.”
RacketCon 2022
Making a pitch for “our ignorance.”

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with Katja Mordaunt and Adam Warski. We talk Katja’s and Adam’s introduction to software, being on the LambdaDays 2022 Programme Committee, a peek what being on the Programme Committee looks like, introducing new people to functional programming, and more.

Our Guests, Katja Mordaunt and Adam Warksi

Katja Mordaunt

katjam on:

• Elm Lang Slack
• elmcraft.org
• Incremental Elm

Adam Warski

adamwarski on Twitter
adamw on Github

Announcements

ElixirConf EU is taking place the 9th and 10th of June, with training running the 6th-8th. For more information and to get your tickets visit https://www.elixirconf.eu/.

:clojureD is taking place June 11th in Berlin, Germany. Visit https://clojured.de/ for more information and to submit your proposal.

Code BEAM Lite A Coruña is taking place in A Coruña, Spain on the 11th of June. Visit https://www.codebeamcorunha.es to register, or to find out more.

Lambda Days 2022 has been moved to the 28th and 29th of July in Krakow, Poland. Visit lambdadays.org to keep up to date.

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@2:51]

About Katja
About Adam
How Katja got into software development and Elm
Basic
Logo
Pascal
Java
Elm
How did Katja get into Elm
PHP
F#
Elm as a beginner friendly language
Felienne Hermans
Code Reading Club
React
How Adam got into software development and Scala
Pascal
Scheme
OCaml
Java
JBoss/RedHat
SoftwareMill
Scala
Why Scala
Groovy
Kotlin
Clojure
Immutable collections by default
Coq
Having done Masters Thesis in Category Theory
You don’t need any background in category theory to be productive in Scala
Jane Street
Being on Lambda Days 2022 Programme Committee
Covid making things difficult on scheduling
The Programme Committee process
Reading through submissions
Getting a coverage of different languages and experience levels
Futhark
Nix
Rust
Balancing the theoretical with practical and fun talks
Lambda Days as a hybrid track plans
“Meeting John Hughes was pretty cool”
Bringing in new people
Cats library
“Embracing everything is an expression”
“Go for tickets that are just about copy”
“It’s all about confidence”
Eric Normand’s 5 step strategy from Grokking Simplicity
Don’t give the names for things to understand what someone understands
Where to find Katja
Katjam on Elm Slack and Elm discords
Elm Lang Slack
elmcraft.org
Incremental Elm
Code Reading Club
Where to find Adam
adamwarski on Twitter
Tapir
shelly.dev

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with Laura M. Castro. We talk her introduction to Erlang, Final Project and Ph.D. around Erlang, Research and Teaching using Erlang and Elixir, the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, Code Beam Lite, Erlang Workshops and more.

Our Guest, Laura M. Castro.

@lauramcastro on Twitter
lauramcastro on Github
https://lauramcastro.github.io/

Announcements

ElixirConf EU is taking place the 9th and 10th of June, with training running the 6th-8th. For more information and to get your tickets visit https://www.elixirconf.eu/.

:clojureD is taking place June 11th in Berlin, Germany. Visit https://clojured.de/ for more information and to submit your proposal.

Code BEAM Lite A Coruña is taking place in A Coruña, Spain on the 11th of June. Visit https://www.codebeamcorunha.es to register, or to find out more.

Lambda Days 2022 has been moved to the 28th and 29th of July in Krakow, Poland. Visit lambdadays.org to keep up to date.

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@2:51]

About Laura
Universidade da Coruña
Erlang during University
OCaml
Java
C
Prolog
OCaml being completely different, even in second year of University
Contact with computers as typewriters
Basic
Studying Computer Engineering as good profession career track
Course on Functional Programming in 4th year
First Exposure to Erlang
“I was a Lego Kid”
“It will do the things I tell it to do”
End of Degree Project
Writing a Risk Management system in Erlang
Modeling policies as processes
Pattern Matching
Doing Research in the Computer Engineering world
Ph.D. on what Functional Programming helped put on the table
Dialyzer
Seeing what it would be like to work in academia and the research world
Delphi
“What did functional programming bring to the table?”
State in Processes
Pattern Matching
Recursions
“[…] they seem straight forward 20 years later”
Matthew Flatt – A Racket Perspective on Research, Education, and Production
Keeping research close to industry
Teaching Erlang in her Software Architecture course
“They’ve never seen really distributed architectures”
Automatic Validation and Testing
“You specify what you want to test”
Proper
Designing for Scalability with Erlang and OTP
WhatsApp
Suffering from the Secrecy of Using Erlang
Erlang Ecosystem Foundation
Overview of the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation
Education Working Group
OTP Behaviors
Ecto
University of Kent Erlang Master Classes; Class 1; Class 2; Class 3
exercism
Erlang Camp
Erlang and OTP in Action
Code BEAM Lite A Coruña
Code BEAM Twitter Account
Code BEAM A Coruña Twitter Account
Sponsorships for Code BEAM Lite
Erlang Workshops
Brujo Benavides
Erlang Workshop with Laura and Brujo
Hank
Rebar 3
Property Based Testing Training Workshop coming soon
Telegram

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with Aleksander Lisiecki. We talk his introduction to Erlang, non-standard use cases for Erlang and Elixir, Erlang and Elixir School, and more.

Our Guest, Aleksander Lisiecki.

@AlekLisiecki on Twitter
aleklisi on Github
Aleksander’s Email at Erlang Solutions

Announcements

ElixirConf EU is taking place the 9th and 10th of June, with training running the 6th-8th. For more information and to get your tickets visit https://www.elixirconf.eu/.

:clojureD is taking place June 11th in Berlin, Germany. Visit https://clojured.de/ for more information and to submit your proposal.

Lambda Days 2022 has been moved to the 28th and 29th of July in Krakow, Poland. Visit lambdadays.org to keep up to date.

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@2:44]

About Aleksander
Lambda Days
Erlang
Elixir
Haskell
Software background coming into University
Java
C++
Taking a class on Ada and Erlang
Piotr Matyasik
Ariane 5
Getting an Internship in Erlang
Erlang Solutions
School of Erlang
Michal Slaski
Peer Stritzinger
GRiSP boards
Aleksander’s School of Erlang repos on Github

• Fall of 2020
• Fall of 2019
• April 2022

Things appealing about Erlang
Tooling for inspecting and observing the system
Kubernetes
Erlang Application
Concurrency and Parallelism in Erlang
Common Roadblocks to Understanding Erlang and Elixir
Prolog like syntax
Tooling
Rebar3
Gradualizer
Gradient
Processes in the BEAM
Spawnfest
Aleksander’s post on Spawnfest
Neo4j
Other interesting projects in Erlang and Elixir Aleksander has done
The Sound of Erlang
Undertone
Duncan McGreggor’s presentation on Undertone
Raspberry Pi Zero W
Building a coal stove refill monitor application
Firebase
Murphy’s Law
Aleksander’s upcoming talk at Lambda Days
Lambda Days 2022
Joanna Wrona
Slightly non-standard use cases for Erlang
Web Scraping
Monte Carlo Simulations
ElixirConf EU 2022

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with Renzo Borgatti. We talk his introduction to Clojure, learning the extended vocabulary of Clojure, his book Clojure: The Essential Reference, gems in the Clojure language, side projects, and much more.

Our Guest, Renzo Borgatti.

@reborg on Twitter
reborg on Github
https://reborg.net/
Clojure: The Essential Reference from Manning

Announcements

ElixirConf EU is taking place the 9th and 10th of June, with training running the 6th-8th. For more information and to get your tickets visit https://www.elixirconf.eu/.

:clojureD is taking place June 11th in Berlin, Germany. Visit https://clojured.de/ for more information and to submit your proposal.

Lambda Days 2022 has been moved to the 28th and 29th of July in Krakow, Poland. Visit lambdadays.org to keep up to date.

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Discount Code

Use code podgeekery20 to save 40% off your order at Manning.com

Topics [@2:44]

Welcome Renzo
About Renzo
Java
Fermilab
Ruby on Rails
Objective C
Clojure
InfoQ
Clojure Koans
What kind of foundation looking at Ruby from Java set for Clojure
Landing on Clojure too late to chat freely with Rich Hickey on IRC
Components as a way for dependency injection
Common Functional ideas Renzo wound up adopting before leaving Java
Understanding the idioms of Clojure and the effect they have on code
Learning how to organize larger codebases
Limitations of working with a restricted vocabulary
“Being curious about what else was there and I was not using”
Reading Clojure source code
Refreshing one-self by looking at Clojure source code
Clojure: The Essential Reference from Manning
What Hidden Gems found when writing the book
fnil
juxt
Combinators
Swap combinator
Scheme
“Understanding what does it mean to be a Lisp”
Actor Model
Continuations
Project Loom
Project Loom Proposal
Other insights from working on the book
Software Transaction Memory
“It made me realize how deep, and how thought out, the implementation in Clojure is”
Clojure for the Brave and the True
Clojure Programming
Other things Renzo is involved with
parallel
Wishing for an “Audible for [Technical] Papers”
Out of the Tar Pit
Papers We Love presentations
re:Clojure
Takeaways from re:Clojure
Clojurians Podcast
Virtual conference benefits
Hybrid conferences as an interesting experiment to give best of both worlds
Lambda Days
Elixir Conf EU
Erlang Solutions
Code Sync
Code Mesh
Tower of Interpreters
Stratified Design
JUXT
The new Clojure “iteration” function blog post
Prolog
Datalog
Expert Systems

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with Yehonathan Sharvit. We talk his upcoming book Data Oriented Programming, what Data Oriented Programming is, how it differs from Functional Programming, how DOP fits with typed languages, and more.

Our Guest, Yehonathan Sharvit

@viebel on Twitter
viebel on Github
https://blog.klipse.tech/
Data Oriented Programming from Manning

Announcements

The Big Elixir is taking place March 24th and 25th in New Orleans. Save 20% on tickets you use the code FUNCTIONALGEEKERY2022. Visit https://thebigelixir.com/ to register.

ElixirConf EU is taking place the 9th and 10th of June, with training running the 6th-8th. For more information and to get your tickets visit https://www.elixirconf.eu/.

:clojureD is taking place June 11th in Berlin, Germany. Visit https://clojured.de/ for more information and to submit your proposal.

Lambda Days 2022 has been moved to the 28th and 29th of July in Krakow, Poland. Visit lambdadays.org to keep up to date.

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Manning Discount Code

Reminder that listeners get 40% off with code PODGEEKERY20 on Data Oriented Programming, and other items from Manning Books like The Joy of Clojure, and Grokking Simplicity that were mentioned in the episode.

Topics [@3:22]

Welcome Yehonathan
About Yehonathan
How Yehonathan discovered Clojure
C++
Java
JavaScript
Russell’s Paradox
Lisp as an implementation of Lambda Calculus
SICP lectures
Seeing a colleague writing Clojure
Stack Overflow
Starting to work in Clojure
Working on a web scraper
Using Clojure for a start-up
Ruby on Rails for back-end and ClojureScript for front-end
Clojure being very straightforward for junior developers
How Clojure influenced their approach to Ruby on Rails
Trying to find out the JavaScript code ClojureScript emitted
Klipse
Inventing/discovering theories of programming
“[Clojure] It’s a language that teaches itself”
Knowing when theories are true
Why the book was written as a discussion.
Insights from reading Clojure language source
What Data Oriented Programming is
Data Oriented Programming from Manning
The Joy of Clojure
“How we represent information”
Why generic maps are better than strong static types for when the code runs
Names compile away
“That is a tragedy.”
Elm
TypeScript
“My hope is that people stay in their programming language and find the best way to work”
Malli
clojure.spec
Haskell
JSON Schema
Christoph Grand
Conway’s Game of Life in Clojure
Principles of Data Oriented Programming:

1. Data is a first class citizen
2. Separate Data from Code
3. Use Generic Data Structures
4. Keep Data Immutable

“How can you do state management [with immutable data]?”
“Immutable data is the best way to manage state!”
Grokking Simplicity
Data Driven Programming vs Data Oriented Programming
Data that exists before you write your program
Distinction between three data related programming paradigms
Swagger
“It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.”
GraphQL
Star Wars GraphQL queries
Rigidity of types in GraphQL
“What do we do in terms of tooling?”
Daughter going into National Service and looking for a place to volunteer
Open Source project is like volunteering
“Somehow it gets back to you”
Grit
Shared Humanity
A refresh of Klipse
Sharing snippets of code
Available for Training on Data Oriented Programming

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with Jordan Miller. We talk her breaking into to software development, activity in the Clojure community, redefining open source contributions, mentoring, and much more.

Our Guest, Jordan Miller.

Jordan Miller

Announcements

The Big Elixir is taking place March 24th and 25th in New Orleans. Save 20% on tickets you use the code FUNCTIONALGEEKERY2022. Visit https://thebigelixir.com/ to register.

ElixirConf EU is taking place the 9th and 10th of June, with training running the 6th-8th. For more information and to get your tickets visit https://www.elixirconf.eu/.

:clojureD is taking place June 11th in Berlin, Germany. The Call for Presentations is open through March 4th. Visit https://clojured.de/ for more information and to submit your proposal.

Lambda Days 2022 has been moved to the 28th and 29th of July in Krakow, Poland. Visit lambdadays.org to keep up to date.

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@2:58]

Welcome Jordan
Clojurians Slack
Jordan on the Cognicast
About Jordan
Starting on WordPress
Learning Lambda Calculus as an introduction to programming
Scheme
DrRacket
Python
Clojure Conj
ClojureScript
re-frame
Building a WordPress site for a restaurant website
Using Dog Tags to visualize linked lists
Falling in love with the Clojure Community
Sean Corfield
Learning Scheme
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
LightTable
5 different ways to show a function
Starting with immutable data
Why so many senior devs seem to come to Clojure
MIT Open Courseware
Original Sussman and Ableson Lectures
Dr. Ana Bell
What about Clojure that put it on her radar
Dave Beasley
Jordan’s experience in Python
Coursera courses
“I struggled with for loops because I learned recursion first”
Having your personal webpage
Diving right into ClojureScript for first job
Self teaching and breaking into software development with a full-time job
Daniel Higginbotham
Vouch
Mike Fikes
David Nolen
JavaScript
React Native
Storybook
How Jordan started her media presence
“I am a performer by nature”
“WTF is Clojure?” video on YouTube
Being a Sponsored open Source developer
Bring the flavor of your
Encourage people to redefine what an open source contribution is
ClojureBridge
What prompted her podcast
Borkdude
Emergent Works
Her mentee Jordan Jay on Github Website
Next Chapter
Alex Miller
“I’ll Fire Spin for a free ticket”
Jordan’s LinkTree

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with Claude Rubinson. We talk his experience learning and using functional programming as a sociologist, organizing software user groups, and more.

Our Guest, Claude Rubinson.

Claude Rubinson
Houston Functional Programmers website
Houston Functional Programmers on Twitter
OCaml Café on Twitter

Announcements

:clojureD is taking place June 11th in Berlin, Germany. The Call for Presentations is open through March 4th. Visit https://clojured.de/ for more information and to submit your proposal.

Lambda Days 2022 has been moved to the 28th and 29th of July in Krakow, Poland. Visit lambdadays.org to keep up to date.

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@2:01]

Welcome Claude
About Claude
Being a Sociology Professor and being on a functional programming podcast
How Claude got interested in Functional Programming
Unix
Python
Lisp
Larry Wall
“Learn a functional programming language for good measure”
Reading books and listening to podcast
Trying to understand the philosophy of functional programming
Houston Functional Programming User Group
Claude’s previous background with software
University of Georgia
Compensation Survey going full-in on the internet
Active Server Pages
SQL
The Dot-Com bust
Linux
Berkeley Unix Users Group
O’Reilly Press
“sed & awk” book
LaTeX
[R]()https://www.r-project.org/
University of Arizona
Charles Ragin
Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Boolean Algebra and Set Theory
Tuscon Free Unix Group
Having to write own version of software for Linux
University of Houston Downtown
Houston Python Meetup
What made Functional Programming attractive for next re-write
“You don’t really understand recursion”
Modeling Data in a SQL Database
Using Programming Language to impose rigor on thinking
Algebraic Data Types
Immutable Data
Gene Kim’s “Love Letter to Clojure”
The Biggest Problem in Functional Programming
Having to pick things up really quickly
Was lucky to be able to take the time to absorb ideas
OCaml
Getting Up and Running with an OCaml project
“This is hard, it is going to take some time, and that is okay.”
Eric Normand’s perspective on explaining as “Data, Calculation, and Actions”
Elm
Telling a story of the problem before selling the solution
Functional Programming for taming complexity and scalability
Picking a “Functional Forward” or “Functional First” language
JavaScript
What Claude appreciated the Functional Programming community
Haskell
Qt
High Signal to Noise ratio
Generous and kind community
Members know a number of languages, so can provide comparisons between languages
How Claude uses Type Systems
Tcl/Tk
Ousterhout’s Dichotomy
Using the type system to think through reasoning
“How to do QCA well”
Using Type Signatures (without code) to map the process
“Understanding the Ontology of Measurement”
Writing good clean functions that stand on their own
“Working in OCaml to understand how to do QCA and how to do it well”
Houston Functional Programming User Group
Likely sticking to Hybrid Format
Always looking for speakers
“Introduction to” gets more people showing up
Encourage people to give presentations (even if short ones)
OCaml Café
Call for stability from Programming Language Designers and Library maintainers

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with James Stelly. We talk his explorations of programming languages and how that led to his book Racket Programming the Fun Way.

Our Guest, James Stelly.

Announcements

No Starch Press has offered listeners a 30% discount on Racket Programming the Fun Way until the end of the year with discount code GEEKERY30.

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@1:10]

Welcome James
About James
Fortran
C++
MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage)
FOCUS
NOMAD
Access
Sql Server
Forth
Python
J
C#
JavaScript
Scheme
Racket
LaTeX
James’ first exposure to a functional programming language
F#
Pipeline operator (|>)
Still having access to the rest of .NET ecosystem
Haskell
James’ takeaways from playing with Haskell
Typed Racket
What drew James to Racket
Broad tool changes
Interactivity of Racket
Racket Programming the Fun Way
Writing the book as a way to learn Racket
Racket being a “Swiss Army Knife”
Prolog and Logic Programming
Possibility of expanding Automata Theory using macros
Relationship to Racket
Building a CNC machine
G-Code
Grbl
Arduino
How has playing with different language feed back into “day work”
Visual Basic
What was exciting about using Racket for the problems in the book
Logic Programming
Search Algorithms
Why Racket
“Most mileage out of and can do a lot of different things”
Dr. Racket environment
Hover over variable and see arrows showing usage
What is the target audience of the book
Matthew Flatt as the technical reviewer
“Given everything in the book, that is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with Racket”

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with Duncan McGreggor. We talk his introduction to functional programming; Erlang; Lisp Flavoured Erlang; Lisps, Lisps, and more Lisps; and much, much, more.

Our Guest, Duncan McGreggor

@oubiwann on Twitter

Conference Announcements

Code Mesh is going virtual! Taking place November 5th and 6th, will run virtually across US and European time zones. Find out more and register at https://codemesh.io.

Lambda Days 2021 will be a virtual event spread over several days in February 2021. Visit https://www.lambdadays.org/lambdadays2021 to keep up to date as more information is announced.

If you have a conference related to functional programming, contact me, and I will be happy to announce it.

Announcements

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@2:03]

Welcome Duncan
About Duncan
CPM Kaypro II
Rewriting BASIC games
Duncan’s first exposure to functional programming
Conflation of State and Behavior in Object Oriented Programming
Deeply nested for loops
Python
LISP
Common LISP
Distributed Computing
Twisted Python
Erlang
YAWS exposé on Slashdot
Lisp Flavoured Erlang
Robert Virding
Learning Erlang through LFE
Getting started in LFE
“Common LISP had a much worse story than Erlang ever did”
Common LISP HyperSpec
Ruby
Rust
“Treating Erlang like LISP’s original M-Expressions“
What are Core
SBCL
Chez Scheme
Clojure
LFE Joys – Small, lightweight chunks of functionality that are distributed across arbitrary computing resources.
Not super picky about tech in the job anymore
Enjoy the projects after work to aspire to craftsmanship level
Going Away Card software project for CTO
Go
How functional programming folds in to Duncan’s mentoring junior co-workers
Haskell
Having the clarity of thought that comes with functional programming
“At some level we are all working with distributed systems”
Teaching basics of Erlang: supervision trees, restart strategies, monitoring/linking processes
Reid Draper of Functional Geekery
“Last Write Wins conflict strategy”
Enterprise Integration Patterns
Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP
How does LISP come in when mentoring team-mates
“I love parenthesis” and the order of operations
Low utilization of Macros
Write them all the time when learning though
ltest
ITA Software using LISP
Reader Macros
Muddle
Casting SPELs in LFE
Casting SPELs in LISP
Language Laboratory level
Racket
LFE Machine Manual
Treasures lost in time from looking at other LISP Machine Manuals
The People working to preserve the history
Kent Pittman
CADR machine
MACLISP
ARPA
MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley
Maxima
Zeta Lisp
Xerox PARC
Integrating LFE and Clojure
clojang
jiface
Some other projects on Duncan’s radar
Porting The Sound of Erlang to LFE
Clojure Overtone
SuperCollider
“LFE Chineual”
Having a bare metal install of LFE on a Raspberry Pi
Looking at different boards to run the BEAM on
X11 and XORG
tv
Actively testing LFE 2.0
lfe.io
LFE on Slack
“Follow your bliss”

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

In this episode I talk with Martin J. Logan. We talk his experience in CTO roles guiding organizations through functional programming transformations, from lessons learned, tips, tools, strategies, how the grassroots level can help, and much more.

Our Guest, Martin J. Logan

@martinjlogan on Twitter

Discount Code from Manning

Reminder that as part of last episode Manning has offered listeners of the podcast a permanent 40% discount code, good for any of their products, in all formats.

Use code podgeekery20 for your 40% discount.

Conference Announcements

Elm Conf is going virtual! Taking place July 15th-17th in your home. The Call for Talks is open and early bird registration has started. Find out more at https://2020.elm-conf.com.

If you have a conference related to functional programming, contact me, and I will be happy to announce it.

Announcements

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein, Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@1:40]

Welcome Martin
Erlware
Martin on Episode 13
Erlang Camp
Lambda Jam 2014 – Design and architecture for actors
[Designing for Actor Based Systems blog post)[http://blog.erlware.org/designing-for-actor-based-systems/]
Being a CTO and bringing functional programming into organizations
Guaranteed Rate
William Hill
A first attempt on .NET with F#
Next attempt using Clojure
“My bet was that there are more smart and talented individuals that want to learn functional programming then there are companies smart or brave enough to give it a try”
Opening up the organization to be more polyglot
Wanting at least one Anchor to teach and mentor the group
Why Clojure was good
Being on the JVM.
“We’re doing Java […] its basically Java, it runs with Java, it interoperates with Java”
Lessons learned from the F# going into Clojure
Commitment of investing through the slowdown to get faster
What helps at at the grassroots to help with a transformation
Participation, Mentoring, Someone willing to help work through exercises with people
Real projects to work on
How to think about limiting the talent pool on the bet for being a functional programming shop
How big of a community are you really looking to build
Being exciting enough to get people from Cognitect working who worked on Clojure
Training and seeding teams
Having the light bulb go off and not wanting to leave and have to go back to other languages
Small team (4-6 people) with single anchor for about 6 months to build a team
Allowing those team members to go out to seed new teams
The fear moves away and people want to learn Clojure
ClojureScript being pulled into the front-end browser flows
Clojure University
Importance of the Install Party to get a high quality development environment setup
Clojure Essentials
Functional Programming patterns similar to Object Oriented Patterns
Doing it again at William Hill with Scala
Avoiding the same bad habits in Java
Scala community being steeped in Category Theory
“Scala will expose you everything you get out of Haskell on the JVM”
Streams in Scala
Helping to make the ground more fertile for a functional transformation
Pointing at other successful organizations
Languages on the JVM help
Helping find an anchor
Working to make it really successful
Focus on the business value and minimize the risks
“Don’t make it just a learning project but a delivery project as well”

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.