May 2009 Meeting

F# Outside the Lab

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

It seems that almost every time we hear about F# being used it is always in a experimental setting or in a niche application. Maybe that's a common trait that F# shares with many other functional programming languages and its roots in the Microsoft Research labs.

Alex Pedenko has been exploring uses for F# for day-to-day programming tasks and he will be sharing his experience with the group in this talk.

Alex will start with a quick introduction to F# but it would work best if you could at least skimmed over some tutorial or video just to get the basic syntax and feel of the language.

UPDATE: Here are some links and source code from the presentation.

Alex has been in software development for about 13 years, starting off on Borland Delphi, then spending about 4 years in Java and finally making the switch to .net around '03

Currently, he is the director of software architecture and chief architect at a healthcare services company. He has used that role as an opportunity to inject some modern ideas into an otherwise lagging industry, moving the company from a classic "giant web-app strapped to an even more giant db", to a distributed, service-oriented environment utilizing RESTful services, and rich-client applications.

He has spent roughly 6 months researching f#, its applicability to business systems, and viability in a commercial environment.

He adds:

I like long walks on the beach... er.. wait, that's for a different site :)

7:45 pm

Time for our monthly open discussion (if the 1st portion doesn't run late). Functional programming, either in a real functional language or in C#, JavaScript, Ruby, etc, which support some of the same constructs, is making inroads on software development. Is it the next big thing or just one more thing in our toolbox?

When: 5/13/2009 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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