Upcoming Speaking Engagements 3
I’m speaking this Friday at RubyConf on Better Ruby Through Functional Programming. I’ll introduce long-overlooked ideas from FP, why they are important for Ruby programmers, and how to use them in Ruby.
In two weeks, I’m speaking on Wednesday, 11/19 at QCon San Francisco on Radical Simplification Through Polyglot and Poly-paradigm Programming. The idea of this talk is that combining the right languages and modularity paradigms (i.e., objects, functions, aspects) can simplify your code base and reduce the amount of code you have to write and manage, providing numerous benefits.
Back in Chicago, I’m speaking at the Polyglot Programmer’s meeting on The Seductions of Scala, 11/13. It’s an intro to the Scala language, which could become the language of choice for the JVM. I’m repeating this talk at the Chicago Java User’s Group on 12/16. I’m co-writing a book on Scala with Alex Payne. O’Reilly will be the publisher.
Incidently, Bob Martin is also speaking in Chicago on 11/13 at the APLN Chicago meeting on Software Professionalism.
No Clojure?
I’d love to see your RubyConf talk. I’ll keep an eye out for the vids.
Excellent article here:
www.wuenschenswert.net/wunschdenken/archives/117
that, for me, defines the difference between Functional and OO programming. Not that either one is useless, but it does show that it’s a mental model thing—it depends on how you think.
I tried sending this to an email address I found online, but it got returned to me. So here goes…
And now I have to thank you for taking the time to read my blog about your talk. If you can believe it, this is literally my second day of blogging. I just never tried it before, but when my company started a blog and I found myself at RubyConf with plenty to write about, I decided to give it a shot.
In re-reading my own post, I realized that I didn’t make it clear what confused me. I don’t have any problem buying into FP. In fact, one of my “performance goals” for the next six months at Cyrus is to learn a functional language and do something useful with it on my own. What had me confused was why to apply these principles in a dynamic language like Ruby. But you make very good points, and ones that started to click for me after I listened to Jim Weirich’s talk (after which I wrote “maybe Dean Wampler was onto something with his Ruby functional programming talk”).
I’m looking forward to your Scala book, by the way. I’ve had some minimal experience with the language, and one of my coworkers has been a driving force behind learning the language at our company. Good luck!
Joe