Re: FringePhilly

["Toby DiPasquale" <codeslinger@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Andrew Gwozdziewycz <apgwoz@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

For a group with ~12 active members and < 100 subscribers to the
mailing list, I think the consequences are pretty minimal.

> 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?

It sounds like we haven't really covered the basics of the reasons
behind the name change. We want to be free to a) include people who
have interesting things to say or contribute that don't necessarily
know or care about FP in specific, and b) we'd like to cover topics
that are interesting to the majority of us but not necessarily
FP-related. We've eeked by thus far, but its becoming something of an
issue between the things we'd like to talk about and the realm that is
FP. For example, just this past meeting we had a really cool program
manager join our group; she's not necessarily interested in FP for the
long haul, but is someone with interesting things to talk about, can
contribute intelligently and is cool. Why shouldn't we have her in the
group?

> 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?

I don't think of it as "hiding" so much as just expanding the focus of
a cool group of people. We can still talk all the FP we want, but
we're also saying its cool to talk about other stuff, too. In the end,
its all about the members we have, not the topics we cover.

-- 
Toby DiPasquale