If you're going to be in Austin on May 5th and you're interested in some free dev training, I heartily encourage you to attend the Austin Code Camp, a community event hosted by the Austin .NET User Group. Not only is it a great event, but I encourage you to attend because I'm one of the speakers and I don't want the only attendees for my session to be hobos looking for free air conditioning.
What will I talk about? Why, I have a summary for that!
Functional Programming in C# - Ruby, Python, and the resurgence of Lisp have all shown an intriguing alternative to the way most of us program. Typically, we have some data, and we run the data through an ordered set of procedures in a specific order; any deviation from this and things start to blow up. What these other languages offer is the ability to program functionally; that is, the ability to chain together functions without this explicit order and without creating any side effects. This makes it much easier to optimize, verify, and parallelize a program. C# does include the ability to write code functionally, and in this session, we'll explore how to do this, why we'd want this, and a few choice comebacks to use when Lispers make fun of our language.
I know, I know: with a description like that, the assembled crowd will likely constitute a fire hazard. Anyway, I think it's an interesting, relevant topic, and I should have some good brain food for the attendees. If not, well, there's the free air conditioning.
Posted by Cody at April 10, 2007 06:20 PM