This is the first month of our new format, based on discussion following the survey: The first half will be geared toward beginners, and the second half will be geared toward more advanced material.

For the next several months the beginner material will be a series of lessons in the Haskell programming language. We will be following Brent Yorgey's CIS 194 syllabus (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html). So bring a laptop, or just follow along. Between months you are encouraged to work on the assignments and we will review them. Lyle will be leading the lecture this month.

This month's advanced talk will be delivered by Leif, who will be following up his discussion of data parallelism in Spark (Scala) and Haskell.

This month, Echo will be leading us through Haskell Lesson 2 (Week 2 at http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html)! The category theory talk has been rescheduled for April.

This meeting continues our Haskell lesson series with Echo delivering Lesson 3 on Recursion Patterns, Polymorphism, and the Prelude from Brent Yorgey's CIS194 course (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html).

Lyle will give an introduction to category theory, a theory about mathematical structures and their relationships, which has applications in functional programming.

The meeting will be at Collective Agency in the Tiffany Center - the same place as the February meeting. The elevator is expected to be restored to operation by then. (UPDATE: Elevator service to the 8th floor has not yet been restored, so you will have to walk from the 4th floor.) Someone will wait in the lobby to let you in as the front doors are locked after 6. The meeting is on the 8th floor.

Join us for another fun-filled evening of learning and discussion!

Tonight, Lyle will present Lesson 5 from Brent Yorgey's CIS 194 lectures: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures/05-type-classes.html, as well as reviewing the homework from Lesson 4.

Then, Matt Rice will talk about the 1ML language, a variant of ML which unifies the main expression/type language with the language of the module system (signatures, structures and functors). He's also been creating his own language derived from it.

This month, Leif will present Lesson 6 on Lazy Evaluation from Brent Yorgey's CIS 194 lectures.

Then, Rob Norris will talk about free things.

Meeting is on the 8th floor of the Tiffany Center. If you arrive before the meeting starts, there will be someone in the lobby to open the front door for you. If not, there will be a sign posted with a phone number for you to call, and someone will come down to let you in. Take the elevator on the right to the 8th floor, and exit to your right. The sign next to the space says Forge Portland. We meet in the large open area there. 

This month, we'll be meeting in a new location! Collective Agency has moved to 511 SW 10th Ave. We'll be meeting in the main area.

First, we'll cover Lesson 7 on Folds and Monoids from Brent Yorgey's CIS 194 Haskell lectures.

Then, Jamon Holmgren will explain his implementation of the A pathfinding algorithm in Elm. A is used in games to calculate the least-cost path for a computer character to move from one spot to another. Elm is a language similar to Haskell (but simpler) that compiles down to JavaScript, used for apps that run in web browsers.

Lyle will present Brent Yorgey's CIS 194 Lesson 8 on IO in Haskell.

Then Lyle will present Vintage BASIC, a BASIC interpreter he wrote in Haskell some years ago but has recently revised.

Echo will present Brent Yorgey's CIS 194 Lesson 9 on functors in Haskell.

Brian Ginsburg will give a short presentation on Minima (https://brianginsburg.com/minima/), a playground for experimenting with minimalist musical patterns, which he wrote in Elm.

We will have extra time in this meeting for hands-on learning. You are encouraged to bring a laptop or work together with someone else. You can practice working with functors, hack on Minima, or ask any other questions you might have.

Come celebrate the 10th anniversary of PDX Func! The first meeting was on 11/15/07. There'll be food and drink and cake! We'll also discuss the new format for meetings based on the survey results. We will also go over the Applicative Functor lesson from CIS 193, which will be our final lesson from that track.