Re: FringePhilly

I think the idea is that PhillyLambda has focused on not just
functional programming, but all sorts of non-mainstream technologies.

In that case, why not Alt.Lang.PHL or something that signifies the use of "alternative" languages, but doesn't confuse us with theater. I'm not really suggesting a specific name (despite my examples), but am suggesting that before we go so far as adopting a new name, consider the consequences.

But, on the other hand, what topics have come up that haven't been related to functional programming? There have been talks that I haven't attended for sure, but even the talk on Hadoop is related to functional programming, despite the guise that it's just a way to parallelize computation.

So, if the idea is that we are starting to focus on more "non-mainstream technologies", and not just functional programming topics, what are they? Do people want to start discussing more about Parallelization? If so, great! It seems to be a growing trend that parallelization makes more sense in languages without side-effects. Do we wanna discuss web development? Great! Let's talk about how we can use continuation passing style, or first class continuations to create modal frameworks. Would you rather talk about databases? Awesome! Let's talk about how a functional language such as ERLang was used to create CouchDB, which has been shown to scale very well. Graphics programming? Let's talk about how easy it is to get going with OpenGL on PLT-Scheme, and how macros can really reduce the amount of work you need to do when creating complex scenes. Wanna talk about PL in general? Awesome, because unless you're talking specifically about languages without first class functions, or only about type theory, you can still do this in such a way that functional programming topics are relevant, and who's to say these things aren't relevant to our understanding of functional programming anyway?

There's a growing trend of "non-believers" in functional languages. I recently saw Brian Kernighan talk about the future of programming languages, and how he believes that since most people think about sequential operations, functional languages will never be truely "mainstream." But, C# is getting lambdas, and so is Java, PHP and most other languages these days (even C++)... So, what good is it to hide behind a new name again?

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Andrew Gwozdziewycz <apgwoz@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why not just just call us FunctionalPHL, or
> FuncLangPHL? At least with FuncLang you get the symbol abbreviation common
> in the functional language world...