TechWeekend Pune - Functional Programming December 17, 2010

Have you heard of Clojure, Erlang, Scala, F# and wondered why people are getting all excited about these new fangled languages? Then this is your chance to find out. And if you are a programmer or are otherwise working in the software technology space and have not heard any of those names, then you need to start reading more, and you certainly need to attend this TechWeekend5 in Pune this Saturday.

Vayana Services and TechWeekend Pune presents a detailed session on Functional Programming this Saturday, 18th December from 10am to 1pm, at Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, MCCIA in ICC Trade Tower (A Wing, Ground floor), S.B. Road. You must attend.

Object-Oriented Programming is now passe, and all the cool kids (i.e. the star programmers) have started looking very seriously at functional programming languages like Clojure and Erlang. The more visionary ones (like our speakers this week: Dhananjay Nene, Bhasker Kode, and Baishampayan Ghose) are building the next generation of products in these languages.

Find out the What, the Why and the How on Saturday.

There will be three talks, listed below, and some time for general discussions around this topic.

Why you should care about functional programming – by Dhananjay Nene

This talk will focus on important characteristics of functional programming and the current landscape in terms of variety of languages and its adoption. The talk will also refer to how leveraging it can help you in terms of brevity, concurrency, better abstractions, testability, economics and particularly enjoyability. A small part of the talk will also focus very superficially on the Scala programming language.

About the Speaker – Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay is a passionate programmer and a consulting software architect. He loves to learn, research, prototype and deploy new technologies and languages even as he is strongly focused on ensuring that the choices are made consistent with the business objectives and landscape. He currently writes code for and advises Vayana Enterprises in his role as its Chief Architect.

An Introduction to Erlang – by Bhasker Kode

While ideating hover.in towards the end of 2007 Bhasker soon become an ardent evangelist of Erlang and it’s fault tolerant nature traditionally intended for use in telecom & messaging circles. Following it’s rising use in building real-time and low-latency applications at web scale Bhasker has presented Hover’s erlang growth stories at Commercial Users of Functional Programming Conference in Edinburgh along with Facebook, Erlang Factory in London, and Foss.in in Bangalore talking about the role of functional programming. Hover’s engineering efforts can be tracked at http://developers.hover.in

About the Speaker – Bhasker Kode

Bhasker is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pune-based Hover Technologies, a user-engagement platform that allows web publishers to add a new channel of earning ad revenue through the use of in-text “tooltip” based ads. He has always been captured by the potential of the internet as part of the core team behind several destination portals and startups from his college days in Chennai. His introduction to functional programming came from his stint as the first few developers at Bangalore based Tutorvista where he built the calendar, syndication, whiteboard among other products used by thousands across the world everyday.

Clojure & its solution to the Expression Problem – Baishampayan Ghose

The “Expression Problem” arises when we want to add new functionality to a library that we don’t control. Most popular programming languages accomplish this task by Monkey Patching, Wrapper Classes, etc. In this talk, BG will discuss the demerits of traditional approaches to the problem and how Clojure solves this problem using Protocols. This talk is intended to show-off the real power of Clojure in solving complex problems.

BG has chosen to talk about a particular feature of Clojure in depth instead of skimming over many things in a hurry because he believes that Clojure’s approach to solving the Expression Problem clearly demonstrates the thought process that has gone into designing the language and shows how it’s different from most other programming languages. I will also cover the very basics of reading Clojure code in just a few minutes which will also demonstrate the simplicity of the language itself.

About the Speaker – Baishampayan Ghose

Baishampayan Ghose (mostly known as BG) is the co-founder & CTO of http://Paisa.com. He has been a career Functional Programmer and has programmed professionally in Common Lisp, Clojure & now Erlang.

About the Sponsor – Vayana Services

Vayana Services offers an easier option for small and medium enterprises to obtain working capital financing from banks by electronically sourcing, transferring and tracking digitally signed trade documents across trading parties and banks. It is a financial service backed by a cloud based offering with its development and operations management team based in Pune. With a strong belief that healthy businesses are greatly assisted by using healthy technology, Vayana Services looks forward to an increasingly frequent and high quality interaction within the software technology community in Pune and welcomes you all to Techweekend 5.