Lambda Lounge Manchester

I discovered the Manchester Lambda Lounge yesterday and popped over to Manchester to take a look. There was a presentation on implementing monads and arrows in Scala, followed by some discussions in the pub.

I consider myself somewhat fluent with monads, although less-so with arrows since I’ve not used many arrow-based libraries, so I took it as a lesson in Scala using familar concepts, rather than a lesson in monads and arrows using a familiar language. I have to say that Scala doesn’t look terrible for a JVM language, but it seems to suffer from Java’s type system dragging it down. We couldn’t quite work out a generic monad implementation which Scala’s type system would accept. I’ve spent a bit of time mulling this over, which I’ll put up in a separate post.

While chatting in the pub afterwards I met a fellow Coq user, who’s currently working through the Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT) book. He mentioned an interest in giving a future talk about Coq, which I was also thinking about doing. Since I’m a Coq n00b I’ve instead sent a message to the mailing list about doing a talk on Idris, so we’ll see if that materialises :)

PS: It did ;)