λondon HUG

Video: Design Patterns as Higher-Order Datatype Generic Programs

Here at last is the video from the November HUG. Many thanks to Dr Jeremy Gibbons of Oxford Computing Lab for coming to give this talk on Design Patterns as Higher-Order Datatype Generic Programs (slides in PDF format).

UPDATE: To download the video in FLV format (playable with mplayer or VLC media player) click here.

Jeremy Gibbons: Design Patterns as Higher-Order Datatype-Generic Programs

It’s meeting time again! The next meeting of the HUG will be on 14th November from 6:30PM at City University. Dr Jeremy Gibbons from the Oxford University Computing Laboratory will be giving a talk entitled Design Patterns as Higher-Order Datatype-Generic Programs. Here is the abstract:

Design patterns are reusable abstractions in object-oriented software. However, using current programming languages, these elements can only be expressed extra-linguistically: as prose, pictures, and prototypes. We believe that this is not inherent in the patterns themselves, but evidence of a lack of expressivity in the languages of today. We expect that, in the languages of the future, the code part of design patterns will be expressible as reusable library components. Indeed, we claim that the languages of tomorrow will suffice; the future is not far away. The necessary features are higher-order and datatype-generic constructs; these features are already or nearly available now. We argue the case by presenting higher-order datatype-generic programs capturing Origami, a small suite of patterns for recursive data structures.

See the venue page for details of how to get there. No specific room number has been allocated yet, so look out for signs or other recognisable Haskellers when you get there.

October pubmeet

Following the usual schedule of alternating between talks and pure pubmeets,
the next meeting will be in the Slaughtered Lamb from 6:30pm on Tuesday 30th
October. Hope to see you there!

Nested Data Parallelism Video Returns!

As some of you noticed, Google Video deleted the video of Simon Peyton Jones’ talk on Nested Data Parallelism from our first meeting. Well, thanks to Matthew Sackman, we now have some new hosting and can provide the video ourselves. It should appear in the embedded flash player below. Please contact me if you have any problems viewing this.

Simon’s slides are here (PowerPoint). To download the video in FLV format (playable with mplayer or VLC media player) click here.

Videos

Nested Data Parallelism: Simon Peyton Jones
Slides are here (PDF).
Direct download here.

Games in Haskell: Matthew Sackman and Tristan Allwood
Slides are here (PDF).
Direct download here.

More videos coming soon…

Better Video for Games in Haskell

Thanks to Matthew Sackman, we can now provide the video of his talk (with Tristan Allwood) on Games in Haskell through the following embedded Flash player. This gives us much better control over the video quality compared with Google Video. Please let me know if you have any issues viewing this. As before, you can download the slides here.

NB: If you don’t have Flash installed, the direct download link is here. Linux users can play this with mplayer.

You may also have noticed that Google has deleted the video of Simon Peyton Jones’ talk on Nested Data Parallelism from our first meeting. I’m now working on getting that video online again.

Games in Haskell: Video now Available

The video of Matthew and Tristan’s talk on “Games” in Haskell is now online at Google Video. Their slides are here (PDF). Unfortunately the sound is not very high quality in this video… my apologies for that.

Many thanks to Matthew and Tristan. Also many thanks to Ross Paterson, who gave us a talk on fingertrees. There is no video of Dr Paterson’s talk, but his paper (with Ralf Hinze) is here.

Meeting reminder and abstract

Just a quick reminder that the next London HUG meeting is coming up on Thursday 20th September at City University from 6:30PM. Matthew and Tristan have sent me an abstract for their talk, as follows:

Take 2 PhD students who have never programmed in the IO Monad before, lock them in an office for 3 months, and let them loose with Haskell. In this talk we show our attempt at writing a classic tron game with a twist - and show some pitfalls we fell into and lessons learned. We then took some time to reflect, and decided to start to remake a nuclear war game, again with a twist - and will show our progress, plans and invite discussion on design idioms.

OpenGL demos included.”

Also, Dr Ross Paterson will be giving a talk on finger trees.

See you there!

Next Meeting 20th September

I’m pleased to announce that the next London HUG meeting will be on Thursday 20th September at City University, starting 6:30PM. This time we have two great talks for you.

Firstly, Dr Ross Paterson of City Uni will talk about finger trees. To quote from his abstract:

“We introduce 2-3 finger trees, a functional representation of persistent sequences supporting access to the ends in amortized constant time, and concatenation and splitting in time logarithmic in the size of the smaller piece. Representations achieving these bounds have appeared previously, but 2-3 finger trees are much simpler, as are the operations on them. Further, by defining the split operation in a general form, we obtain a general purpose data structure that can serve as a sequence, priority queue, search tree, priority search queue and more.”

Afterwards Matthew Sackman and Tristan Allwood, both PhD students at Imperial College, will talk about game design in Haskell. They will hopefully be giving live demonstrations of some of the games they have developed, depending on the availability of hardware. Abstract to follow.

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August 2007 Meeting

For those of you not subscribed to the mailing list: The next meeting is coming up. It will be a pub meet, and will happen next Wednesday (the 22nd). We’ll start at about 6:30, but people will most likely be turning up over most of the evening, so it doesn’t matter too much if you can’t make it there for then.

We haven’t entirely determined a location yet, but it’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll default to the slaughtered lamb again.

Update: Owing to a total lack of alternative suggestions, looks like we’re in the slaughtered lamb again! I’ll bring a sign saying “London HUG” so people can recognise us, but prior experience suggests it’s not hard to spot a large crowd of functional programmers.