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A polyglot programming group meeting in the heart of The Beave. We seem to talk a lot about oddball programming languages and their features. And the usual geekery you'd expect from a programmer's group.
This month we'll have a talk by David Hollingsworth on the Curl language (not to be confused with cUrl the commandline utility).
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A polyglot programming group meeting in the heart of The Beave. We seem to talk a lot about oddball programming languages and their features. And the usual geekery you'd expect from a programmer's group.
This month we'll have a talk by David Hollingsworth on the Curl language (not to be confused with cUrl the commandline utility).
Curl is a statically typed object-oriented language that JIT-runs in a
browser plugin along with a large number of companion libraries and an IDE.
Curl also has an internal tool for compiling to C, so Curl is >90% written
in Curl. It is not related to the wget-like-library also called Curl. See
http://www.curl.com for more.
Some of the topics I can cover:
* Why we (still) need a programming language for the Internet (and why Flash/JavaFX/Silverlight ain't it).
* Mixing text and code: not the heresy XML advocates would have you believe.
* Venture Capitalists ate my syntax: switching from Lisp-y Curl to C-y Curl.
* Java Generics almost make me pine for C++ templates OR if {Array-of int} isn't a real type, your type system sucks.
* Yes, Virginia, non-normalized Unicode means operations are O(n) (aka Strings are not really arrays of chars, but they're closer in Curl).
* DSLs in Curl: source-to-source macros ala Lisp.
* Refactoring is for wimps: a strong versioning mechanism partially mitigates the need for backwards-compatibility, but not entirely.
* Plus the standard "ooh shiny" stuff.
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