The first meeting of the lounge was great! It was very cool to see so many folks I know and so many folks I didn’t already know. I was thrilled at the turnout and I hope everyone continues to make it out.

I blogged a bit more of the happenings and I’ll add more links here as I see them.

See ya next month - Wed January 7th at 6 pm!

More blogs:

• Weiqi Gao
• Matt Taylor
• Randall Hauch
• Michael Easter
• Rob Breidecker

Thanks all for the great response to Lambda Lounge so far!

At this point, I think topics for the first meeting (December 4th) have solidified. I’m planning on kicking off the meeting with an open discussion about what functional and dynamic languages are and we can maybe arm wrestle about whether the two have anything to do with each other.

Next, Matt Taylor of G2One SpringSource will talk about Groovy MetaProgramming with Categories and Mixins.

Finally, Ryan Senior of Ferguson Consulting is going to do an overview of OCaml, of which I know not much, other than that it is a mixture of object and functional styles, dervied from a ML-style static type system (but with type inference).

Should be a great December meeting. The tentative plan for January (on Wednesday the 7th due to the holiday) is for Mario Aquino to talk about dynamic programming in either iPhone or Dashboard widget development and for Mark Volkmann to talk about Squeak Smalltalk.

It is so far totally coincidental to have a functional topic and a dynamic one on the first meeting. But maybe that’s a trend worth continuing. If you have topics you’d like to present or just to request, please use the Google group mailing list so it’s easier to distribute and archive the conversation.

This is the new home of the St. Louis Lambda Lounge!  The Lambda Lounge is a monthly user group organized loosely around the idea of exploring dynamic and functional languages.  More broadly, it’s an open forum to examine new advances in programming languages and libraries.

More info coming soon!