Back to School evening

As we reach the end of the Glorious British Summer, it’s time to pick up our new exercise books and pencil cases and learn some new techniques on Javascript (and a bit of Clojure) in the field!

LambdaLounge is pleased to present an evening suitable for all, and especially newcomers to Functional Programming on Monday 18th September at 7pm at MadLab.

A Functional JS Field Guide

Katie Fenn (@katie_fenn) is a software engineer at npm. She works with all aspects of the web, particularly JavaScript, CSS, Node.JS and ops. When not at her desk, she is usually in the pool or on her bike in the Peak District.

JavaScript is a language of two flavours: object-oriented and functional. Some would say functional is JavaScript’s dominant flavour, but only recently have we started exploring its uses fully. I will show how lessons from functional programming takes advantage of JavaScript’s better features, and may even change the future of computing.

In this talk I will introduce the basic ingredients of functional programming and explain why embracing them makes JavaScript easier to work with. It will be aimed at JavaScript developers of all experience levels and backgrounds.

Writing a tile-matching game in Clojure (first steps)

Ever wondered how to write a tile-matching game (like Candy Crush and the earlier Bejeweled)? And how do you even write a game (with graphics, and state, and user interaction!) functionally? Regular speaker and co-organizer Hakim is just starting to explore this process, and will present some of the basics of modelling the game grid, and playing a basic event loop, introducing some important concepts in functional programming.