Re: [tlug] ICFP at Next TLUG Meeting

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2009-09-06 20:56 +0900 (Sun), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Curt Sampson writes:
> 
>  > Can I get some thoughts on there from others who've had a look through
>  > the stuff on http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/icfp09.html on whether any
>  > of that looks interesting and warrants further explanation?
> 
> The talks by Peirce (on "Lambda the Ultimate TA"; proof assistants
> useful for anything less than shuttle control software?) and Piponi
> (anything out of Industrial Light and Magic has got to be interesting...

The extra stuff you get when your monads are commutative (which IO
and State and friends are specifically not--that's the point of their
existence!) was fascinating, but I'm suspecting not earth-shattering to
those who are not commonly using the non-commutative versions.

Dan Piponi was one of the invited speakers, and he's an amazingly
productive guy; all his Haskell stuff, along with the mathematics,
robot-building, and physics ("Dual Scanning Laser Camera: How to read
the other side of a playing card using Helmholtz Duality."), is just a
hobby for him and these have little or no connection to his day-to-day
work. His home page[1] and blog[2] contain a lot of fascinating stuff.
And you've just got to like a guy whose handle is "sigfpe".

[1]: http://homepage.mac.com/sigfpe/
[2]: http://blog.sigfpe.com/

The Peirce talk was one of the most exciting of the conference, for me,
though he didn't go into a lot of detail. Basically, the summary, that
he ran undergrad students through a math course in which they did proofs
using a proof assistant, and it worked well, covers it.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com