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.

We're out on the west side but all are welcome.

Sometimes there's beer. Feel free to bring some to share!

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.

We're out on the west side but all are welcome.

Sometimes there's beer. Feel free to bring some to share!

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.

We're out on the west side but all are welcome.

This week we'll be doing Richard's creative problem solving exercise

UPDATE: We'll meet in the Training Room on the third floor, room 390. There should be signs to guide you.

This month Markus will be presenting his response to Matt's programming language presentation from last month. If previous presentations by Markus are any indication, a good time will be had by all.

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.

We're out on the west side but all are welcome.

Sometimes there's beer. Feel free to bring some to share!

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.

We're out on the west side but all are welcome.

Sometimes there's beer. Feel free to bring some to share!

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 Eric Wilhelm:

"Perl 6: What you've missed in the last $n years." I will present an overview of the Perl 6 project, a snapshot of recent development, and samples of what you can do with Rakudo Perl 6 now.

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.

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 two short-form talks languages being developed by Westsiders. There may be cake! :)

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 be running Rakudo * to get some exposure to the new Perl 6 language features and check out the Rakudo * ("star") release (a Perl 6 implementation on Parrot.)

The * series is a more featured, predictable, and stable user-focussed release than the git master or monthly development releases of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. This is less cutting-edge than the current development version, and is intended to give early users a relatively slow-moving target to experiment with language features and use cases.

Speaking of slow-moving, Rakudo is really, really slow. This is not the production-grade performance you know from Perl 5, this is the westside's MO of oddball programming language geekery and bloody stumps. We're so cutting edge, we might even start the meeting before the release tarball drops. Just in case, here's the instructions for building git master rakudo:

  git clone
  cd rakudo
  perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot
  make
  make install

  PATH=$PWD/parrot_install/bin:$PATH
  perl6 -e 'say "hello"'

Perl 6 is a substantially different language from Perl 5. If you haven't kept up with the developments in the last few years, now is a good time to take it for a spin.

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's talk is by Richard Fobes:

"Faster than an FFT, the audio-oriented QRST (spectral transform)"

Based on the interest Phil and Ed expressed in my spectral transform, I've spent lots of time during the past two months further developing the software. Besides getting it to work better -- it still needs refinement -- I've ended up creating an audio-compression method I call QRST. I'll be playing sound files to demonstrate what the spectral transform, the audio-compression format, and decompression back into sound files can do, so this will be much more interesting than the words "spectral transform" suggest.

BTW, being faster than the FFT is just one of the side effects of having designed it for use with sound files. Fourier transforms are sooo ssllooww.