25 October, 2012

london HUG

well I just got back from the 1st meeting of v2 of the london haskell users group (apparently it used to exist before; and the ghosts of its former incarnation floated around the room in the form of code kata people)
dude (derek) gave a talk on why do monads matter? - a brave thing to do, given how many have tried their own take on a monad tutorial (myself included). nothing spectacular but certainly another take on monads, and it did tickle my brain in the right areas enough into realising that <$> only needs a Functor so it certainly paid off in the OH! sense; even though that leap was personal to me and wouldn't be apparent if you were at the talk - there was no mention of functors at all, really
Turnout was better than the average dutchhug turnout (sorry Shaun)
It also turns out theres a regular Haskell coding dojo in London, hoodlums, already happening (apparently a spinoff or somehow related to v1 of the london hug)
Went to pub afterwards. room booked (or at least some upstairs space that was otherwise empty). chocolate orange beer, which was less disgusting than it sounds. it was cool to meet a bunch of people using haskell for $ (although I count myself in their ranks these days).
after rapidly throwing down a few of those chocolate orange beers (hence the incoherency and lack of case), I shouted out suggestions for future talks on: agda; quickcheck; parsec; and functors/monads/arrows/applicative (turned out some fucker already had a talk on that...)
next meeting 28th nov 2012. i'll probably be there.
ps also at the pub I met another programmer also called Ben - I asked him if he's going to BenConf but although he'd heard of it, it hadn't suckered him in.

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