This evening's meeting (one week early...sorry) was fairly well attended, for mid summer, with 8 participants. The general consensus was that the "Collective Intelligence" iteration was a success and we began discussing where to take the group next. All indications are that we are going to gear up for a "new Language" iteration with a couple of short one night overviews of Clojure and Scala.
Stan has agreed to give us a 64,000 foot view of Clojure at our July 28 meeting. Stan described a study of Clojure using the "Programming Clojure (Pragmatic Programmers) " by Stuart Halloway as more about learning Functional Programming than it is about learning the syntax of Clojure.
Bob will do the same for Scala at our August 11 meeting. The book "Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-step Guide" by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, Bill Venners seems a little long for a WingDings iteration. Is there something we can do that covers the highlights without digging too deep?
Groovy fell off the list as most of us already have waded into Groovy, at varying levels, and the feeling was that there wasn't enough "new" there to keep our collective interest for long.
There was also, rather brief, consideration of Erlang and Haskell. The discussion, however, went the direction of "Erlang is a realization of the Actor model, which we will see in Scala and Clojure too (I think)" and "Haskell, hmmm, do you know anyone who is using Haskell?". This is the WingDings, though, and there is precedent for the dark horse. Does GHC roll off your fingers as fast as javac? Feel free to start a grass roots campaign for "one night of Haskell" and we'll see where it goes.
From these two meetings, and any discussion in between, we'll hopefully have enough material to make a decision at the August 25 meeting for an new iteration to begin in September. Diversity is the key to WingDings so scour the web in search of tutorials or quick-start postings that can help us gain some traction here. Post it to the group, we are in data collection mode.
Also, Robothon (http://www.robothon .org/robothon/ index.php) returns this year October 9 through 11. They usually have this at Seattle City Center. If you're at all interested in amateur robotics, you will find this event very entertaining. Oh, and no, Steve, your Line Following Maze robot can't communicate with a blimp that hovers above it and sees the whole maze (http://www.robothon .org/robothon/ maze.php): "The robot can be no larger than 6" in any dimension... cannot expand beyond these dimensions at any time during the event".
Thanks again to everyone who volunteered as a moderator for the "Collective Intelligence" iteration and I look forward to seeing where we go from here.
Bob
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