Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 204: 🇪🇸 Lambda World Live 🇪🇸

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

In this episode, Conor interviews Andor, Stephen and an attendee from Lambda World 2024.Link to Episode 204 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)TwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraGuests InterviewedAndor PénzesStephen TaylorShow NotesDate Recorded: 2024-10-04Date Released: 2024-10-18Lambda WorldADSP Episode 133: 🇵🇱 Lambda Days Live 🇵🇱 José Valim, Alexis King & More!Lambda World 2024 - The Butcherbird Combinator - Chris FordLambda World 2024 - Scala Sampler for Functional Soundscapes - Johanna OderskyUnite 2024 Barcelone (Unity Conference)Examples of easy dependently typed programming (in Idris) by Andor Penzes | Lambda Days 2023Dependently-Typed Python by Andor Penzes | Lambda Days 2024DepPy (Dependently Typed Python)CORECURSIVE #065 From Competitive Programming to APL With Conor HoekstraY CombinatorCategory Theory for Programmers - Bartosz MilewskiDevWorld ConferenceQCon ConferenceScala Days ConferenceLambda World 2024 - Stephen Taylor TalkAbove Average in APLDon't Be Mean in APLAPL Wiki MerchCan Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? John Backus Turing Award PaperLambda World 2024 - The Power of Function Composition - Conor HoekstraLambda World 2024 - Kamila Szewczyk TalkIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

And now I'm here in Lambda World, and holy, I love this conference. Like, when I speak to him, I feel like I see Jesus. And the other one is, I seem to like functional programming. So we see each other every sunset, we walk up to a mountain nearby where we live, and we talk functional programming. And it's elegant, it's beautiful when you write it that way. Why would anyone want to program any other way welcome to ads be the podcast episode 204 recorded on october 4th 2024 my name is connor and today we record live from lambda world 2024

i interview three different individuals, Andor Paynesesh, Stephen Taylor, and an attendee from the conference. All right, we are here. Post Lambda World, it is 2024. Technically, is it post? We're headed to the, I think it's after party? After party, yes. After party. And we are here with previous guests. I have no idea what the episode was. Probably 202 minus roughly 50 plus. It's like 70. So probably 140. 2023, right? But it was in May and now it's October. So we're here with Anders Painsish, who was a previous guest when we were at Lambda Days 2023. Not to be confused with Lambda World Cadiz, we are here in Spain. Previously, we were here with Anders, who was a speaker back at Lambda Days in Krakow,

Poland. You were not speaking at Lambda World. You did just speak at Lambda Days 2024. Yes. So tell us first, how has this conference been? What was your favorite talk? And then maybe also tell us what were you speaking about at Lambda Days, which I did not attend this year, but you did. So let me just recap.

I can't really remember all the talks. Basically, I came for like as a part of vacation, a very long vacation, and I'm ending my vacation here. And this was a nice two-day conference, first with the workshop with you, like the array programming. And when I looked at just the program here, I was like, okay, no, I don't want to do functional programming in this conference. There were so many nice array programming talks.

I just went there. I went in. And basically, that's it. What was your favorite talk? Interestingly. But I found the most interesting one is from Jana. Oh, yes. From the music.

Yeah. And I think you need to tell the story for Jana's talk. Well, it was, I mean, there was actually two different music talks. There was the opening keynote by Chris Ford of ThoughtWorks, I believe. And he gave a talk called The Butcher Bird Combinator and did some live music playing. And he was doing his coding in Clojure. A great talk, less pedagogical and more kind of searching through hobbies and trying to teach something along the way.

Whereas, I'm not sure, is it Johanna or Johanna? Do you know the pronunciation? I don't remember. I don't remember. We'll say Johanna, but if we're pronouncing your name incorrectly, we apologize. Odersky, which I discovered today, does make her the daughter of Martin Odersky, famously the creator of the Scala language. And she was doing sort of music exploration similar to what Chris Ford was doing, but she was doing it in the Scala language.

We're about to enter this music bar, and it's probably going to ruin, absolutely destroy the ability to do interviews. We might need to pull people out here. We'll see. So that was your favorite talk. You also started your vacation off two weeks ago at a Unity conference, correct? At a Unity conference, exactly. In Barcelona. In Barcelona.

Do you want to mention anything or any highlights? How did that compare to Lambda World? I'm guessing a very different conference. It's a very different conference. It's an industrial conference. But I really wanted to see how the game development is nowadays. And I'm just looking into it to just make my own little games using Unity. So I found, yeah, let's start my vacation with the Unity Night Conference in Barcelona.

Stay in Spain for two weeks and finish here in Cadiz and after I go home. That's how you got to do your vacations, folks. You got to start at a conference, then take two weeks off, then end at a conference. That's the way to do it. Last but not least, tell us about your talk that you gave at Lambda Days 2024. Is it online already? Can people watch it? And what was it about?

I hope it's online. I haven't watched it. So I just gave a talk about let's grab your seats but basically what we are doing as a research with the University of Nottingham is what is called dependently typed Python. Whoa! Dependently typed Python? Yeah, because our message

here that dependently typed things could be as a nice software engineering thing, as a nice story, nice tool but we can't really popularize dependent types within FP context because FP is very limited audience. So we are giving this try to implement a type system for Python or a subset of Python, which is actually uses dependent types. Is this something that is usable now or is it still in the research sort of development phase?

It's still in very alpha, very useless in that sense, very researchy. We are just gathering ideas, discussing things. Okay, well, that does sound super exciting. We'll put a link in the show. I'm not sure if anything is on GitHub yet, but... The code is open source in GitHub, but it's like

it's not serious at all because we are like interpreter one, interpreter two, interpreter three, serious, interpreter one, interpreter two, so it's more like this prototyping, experimenting, but if you are interested in this topic, just reach me out and we can involve more people

in the long run. Awesome. I'll make sure to include your contact info. We did that the same time last year. We're almost getting hit by mopeds and motorcycles because we're standing in the middle of the road outside this music bar. But we'll be sure to include a link to the GitHub repo if folks maybe want to get involved or something. There's Steven. He's walking in. We'll talk to him later.

Probably not in the bar because it sounds very loud in there. Thanks so much for being interviewed again. Are you have any conference plans on your schedule yet? Because it seems like a year and a half, a year apart, we seem to run into each other at these functional conferences. Well, I hope that we will run into each other, but

I have no plans. I usually just make these things up and when I see a conference, this is interesting, buy the ticket, done. Alright, well, I guarantee you we'll see each other again. The question is when. I guess the listener will just have to wait and see when that happens next. Thanks so much. Thank you very much.

Awesome. All right. We are back. And we're here with... Correct? Yes, correct. And we were just inside. Honestly, this is going to be a pretty bumpy podcast, folks.

We just finished talking to Anders. And then we went into the music bar every time we talked to someone we're gonna have to come out here because it's way too noisy inside and just walked by he saw me he said hey are you connor and you said i heard you on co-recursive which was from years ago and you mentioned that you started programming apl so maybe tell us about your apl journey and then we can talk about lambda World. Yeah, it's a bit difficult because it was many years ago. I don't know, you had a very persuasive way to share on why APL is good,

like the benefit of being able to put down your thoughts in a very short manner and be quick about it. Yeah, absolutely. It's like, I like to say it's coding at the speed of thought. You know, you try and program the way you program in APL, in Java or C++, it's coding at the speed of thought. You know, you try and program the way you program in APL, in Java or C++. It's just impossible. Yeah, and he also shared some good thoughts about general competitive programming.

It all persuaded me to start following you to the point where I started listening to you more than I did to call recursive. And eventually, like, I just went into that rabbit hole and got into the APL community. You said, I think, you ended up meeting Adam online. Yes, I ended up meeting them online. They have a very weird chat forum. I don't remember if it's Yahoo who drives this chat forum. Maybe it has changed.

I think, I know now, these days, it's the APL Stack Exchange. So I'm not sure if that was the same one you ran into. Yeah, it's a very weird old website. You needed to register with a weird account to get accepted by an admin. But I was active there for a while, and Adam was very nice to me. He's very strong in driving that community.

And I don't know, somehow along the way, I started hanging out there every week. I don't know, he sort of way, I started hanging out there every week. I don't know, he sort of got me into a job interview once. Oh, really? Yeah, that sort of got the ball rolling with interviews and everything, so I started doing more job interviews, and all of a sudden I'm working as a software engineer, so life changed, and it all started with you.

Wow, I'm not sure if maybe it was a small role, but it sounds like Adam played an even larger role, and I know he listens to this podcast. So I'm sure, let's see, I mentioned on the last time we were interviewing Anders is that we're constantly almost getting hit by these mopeds and motorcycles. But yes, Adam will be, I'm sure, thrilled to hear that his, whatever role he played, it led to you getting a job in software development. So you've been here at Lambda World.

How have you found, is this your first time? How have you found it? It's my first time. The reason I started with this functional thing is because I got a colleague who started last year, and he transformed my life as well. Like, when I speak to him, I feel like I see Jesus.

And he's very persuasive in this. Like, I think I've been in two conversions in my programming career. One was when I realized it's better to cooperate with people. And the other one is I seem to like functional programming.

And during the past year, I've been reading books about it, and now I'm here in Lambda World, and holy, I love this conference. The coworker that you worked with, was he an evangelist or she an evangelist for a specific language? Or was it just functional programming in general? I think just functional language in general.

I think his background is actually mathematics. Okay. But he's in love with category theory. And he's feeding me every day. Like, we're neighbors now. So we see each other every sunset. We walk up to a mountain nearby where we live, and we talk functional programming.

Oh, you mentioned that you're based out of Sweden, correct? Yeah. In Gothenburg, there's a mountain in the middle of the town, so we hang out over there. It's easy to catch us, because we're two guys talking functional programming. So you've enjoyed the conference. Any highlights or favorite talks?

Okay, so I go to two conferences a year which is I think a lot in this conference I was also attending workshops and I felt like I realized I think I learned better through interaction so this workshop gave me new tools to play with when I'm going back on Sunday I'm going to do play some with some new toys but really the people I was hanging out with after the conference, like when we were having dinner, I got even more wisdom. So now I have like three more subjects to read on. One was Y Combinator. One was Category Theory for Programmers, which is a lecture course sort of thing.

Both lectures and a textbook, yeah, by Bartosz Maluski, yeah. Yeah, and then there was the third one. I think it was something about equality of objects, something in category theory. I don't remember the exact title, but I took screenshots of everything, and I have more things to read on. I mean, people that listen to podcasts are probably sick of hearing it, but the best part of conferences,

I mean, the talks are great, but the best part is the lunches, the hallway track, the going out to a music bar afterwards, bumping into folks, and then, yeah,

just sharing. Everyone here is, I don't want to say a super nerd, but we're all interested in adjacent things, and it's just, it's like, you know,

a theme park or whatever. You know, some people like to play video games and whatnot, but, like, the folks here, we all nerd out on our own nerd stuff, and it's just like a theme park or whatever. Some people like to play video games and whatnot but the folks here, we all nerd out on our own nerd stuff and it's just cool to be hanging out and chatting with folks. Yeah, I agree. I think that these people were very

enthusiastic and shown a lot of passion for functional programming. But really I'm very happy to see you because when I saw you on the day I was like, oh I've followed you for years and now I have a chance. It seemed like it would never happen. You're just a guy from the internet, but it turns out you're real. It turns out I'm a real person, folks.

My parents will love to hear that. But no, awesome bumping into you. If folks haven't been to Lambda World or Lambda Days, you said two conferences. What's the other conference you go to? Earlier this year, I went to Dev World. The year before, it was Gala Days Earlier this year, I went to DevWorld. The year before was Scala Days, and then I've been to QCon.

I just go to two times a year because that's what my job allows me. And if you had to recommend, is LambdaWorld and Cadiz at the top of the list, or is it any conference really? Right now, it's this one. Easy. But it's also a personal

hobby of mine. This one strikes home to me. I mean, if you're into functional programming, the functional conferences are going to obviously hit harder than the other ones, for sure. Yeah, it feels like a religion to me right now. It's a bit unhealthy, but I love it. I'm very happy about this. That is awesome, man. Thank you so much for agreeing in the midst of socializing to come out here. I can think of Adam, at least, to say hi to him. I'm very thankful for him. And I'm thankful for you. Thank you for existing.

Really, you just made a random podcast episode and all of a sudden it's tracked in my life. Everyone has that person, though, right? For me, I mean, there's a bunch of folks, but you know, the one I just finished interviewing him on the last episode was a guy named Sean Parent. He gave a talk that I ended up seeing in like 2017 or 18. And that totally changed like the trajectory of like my interests in my career. So, I mean, it's awesome to hear

that I did the same for you, but everyone has that person right at some point. So, yeah, I think you're right. Thanks so much, man. Enjoy the rest of the night. And yeah, we'll see you back in there yeah you too have a good one we are here once again it's still lambda world 2024 and we're here with a first time adsp guest but a long time panelist of the array cast steven taylor who is not just a panelist of Arraycast, he was the presenter of what was my favorite talk of Lambda World.

I'm probably a bit biased based on the topic you were talking about, but we're going to throw it over to you. Maybe you can tell us a bit about your talk and about your Lambda World 2024 experience. Thank you, Connor. It's great to be on ADS-B. Well, it was very interesting to get the invitation to talk at a functional programming conference. I've long leaned towards functional style. This prompted me to dig into the roots of functional programming and its connection with APL,

which is my first and remains probably my favorite array language. I mean, I think you're kind of given away by wearing the APL hat that you have donned on your head for the whole entire conference. So probably not a secret for most. I just can't get past the beautiful symbols. It's true. I mean, we'll put a link in the show notes, folks. I think people can purchase this hat if they want to, correct? It will be.

It will be so. It's not. Yeah. At the time of recording, it's not so, but it surely will be. This is a custom made hat that I thought that you could get these somewhere, but I guess I was mistaken. I've seen this expression online before. I'm not sure if it's the errands website where I've seen it. I've seen it from somewhere. Yes. Yeah, I adapted it from a functional composition of errands, and I needed to put on the English translation underneath.

Yeah, and I had actually, you showed in your talk, we're skipping the punchline here because you were about to tell us about your talk. But in the midst of it, I've seen the original tacit expression, but then you showed AA, which was above average, the one that you're showing here. And then you said the one below was NM, which is not mean, which you said you had a friend that refers to this as the don't be mean. Yeah, don't be mean. I had never heard that before. So this is the above average hat, and the next one is going to have the variant foot composition

and don't be mean underneath it. This is great. How long has this been a thing? Is this a recent development of tacit expressions, or has this been around for two decades and I just haven't stumbled across it? Well, I give worlds to know. I was talking to Adam, whom we Well, I give worlds to know.

I was talking to Adam, whom we have on the Arraycast podcast, and saying we should get some merch. And he said, oh, it's on the APL wiki. There's a page for APL merchandise. Oh, really? And there's a page on the APL wiki with links to APL merchandise. But I couldn't find quite exactly what I wanted. But I followed to the platforms that provide this stuff and a little design work and made exactly what I wanted.

So this is it. The name of the hat, folks, is the Above Average Hat. And it says above average in English, but above that has the APL tacit expression for above average. It's beautiful. Yeah, it flags all the items in a list where the values are above the average of the list. It's amazing, folks. It's all seven characters, right?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, one, two, three, four, five, six. You can't get better than that. Anyways, we totally got off track. Tell us about your talk. You're giving this a talk on array languages. I believe the title was Hooray for Arrays, a very nice poetic title, which is definitely your style. And you're giving this an origins and the inspiration of functional programming. And I knew vaguely that there was an association with Ken Iverson and APL, but I hadn't realized quite how closely bound together they were. Functional programming was introduced or first canvassed by John Backus in his 1977 Turing Award lecture,

is it possible to get away from the von Neumann style of programming? And apparently he had recommended Ken Iverson for the Turing Award, basically the Nobel Prize for software, and Iverson got it the following year. And in the Wikipedia article on functional programming, you can see that APL is credited as the inspiration for functional programming. So in my talk, I laid out some of the history about where Ken came from on the Canadian prairies of Norwegian stock. Very taciturn people. I thought you didn't make a joke about the fact that taciturn, you were saying the word and the prefix of that, that is tacit.

I thought there was a joke coming in there, but maybe it was just a tacit joke. Well, it's not so much a joke as a point. I mean, Ken wrote his textbook in a very taciturn style. And I was quoting Lee Childs a little later on in the talk saying what he liked about budget motels. Everything I need, nothing I don't. Yeah, yeah.

There is... So we've got a forward focus that is trying to make a right-hand turn around an acute angle of a street. We literally have Rob Verding, around an acute angle of a street, we literally have Rob Verding, co-creator of Erlang, taking a video,

or maybe it's a photo, of this Ford Focus attempting to make this turn. It's an impossible turn. They've done it. The Ford Focus is through. Anyways, back to you. Well, you know from our time together on the Arraycast that a recurring annoying theme of mine is the role of aesthetics in programming. And because we're all technical and we're all serious people,

we mostly don't like to talk about this or discuss it. But as best I can see, many of us are haunted by and in pursuit of the beautiful, except we pronounce it cool. I'm not sure if it was you I was talking to. I was talking to someone earlier today that was saying the folks that have gotten into array languages, I think it was you, were saying that one of the number one reasons they quote is why they got into it is because of the aesthetics of it. Yeah.

Something like that. This was at the Dialogue 24 conference in Glasgow two weeks ago. I was chairing a panel in which we were interviewing, kind of like a TV chat show, some young APLers, people recently into it. Now, back in the day when APL was a big thing, most of the people who came to it had done no programming before and it was easy to teach them this because they didn't know any different. But

nowadays, most people who come to the array languages, it's not the first language, it's often not the third or even their fifth. And so there's a fair amount of unlearning to do to get competent with it. For many of them, APL would appear as, well, this is just basically very weird compared to all the other stuff I know. So one of the questions we asked was, how did you feel when you encountered this stuff what were you thinking and the second question was and why did you stick with it and that was the question the answers

were surprising me it's people were talking about the the beauty of it it's like i love coding this way i like right i don't which is what i felt half a century ago when i discovered it's like didn't really want to write code any other way. Yeah, you were in the Butcher Bird Combinator talk yesterday. Oh, you missed that. But there was a closure expression that they showed using, I think, three or four lines of code. And I saw it, and I thought to myself, that's three characters in APL and BQN. And sure enough, I worked that into my talk today.

And then one of the questions I got was, why are you such a fan of tacit? You seem like head over heels in love with this style. And I'm like, did you see the code at the beginning of the talk? The closure code, they literally had to build up an explicit lambda just to duplicate an argument that they could pass to a binary function. We have a symbol in all the array languages, APL, BQN, for duplicating an argument that's just a higher order function that you pass a binary function. Like, we have a symbol in all the array languages, APL, BQN, for duplicating an argument

that's just a higher order function that you pass a binary. And it's just like, once you have that power, and it's elegant, it's beautiful when you write it that way, and then you don't, it's just like, why would anyone want to program any other way? I'm not sure if you have the same.

For two years, for two years, Connor, I have been kidding myself that i'm learning python i keep putting it aside because i get bored and irritated i don't have a need to learn it i just feel i should probably know how to write python it's like oh really yeah it's i mean i do a lot of work in python you can be productive in it because they have so many libraries but there's a lot of work in Python. You can be productive in it because they have so many libraries, but there's a sense of not emptiness, but just like the, there's no elegance or beauty. Not to say that Python's on, I feel bad saying it's not a beautiful language, but it's just, you don't, it's not the same thing as programming in array languages. So back to Lambda World 2024, is this a conference you'd recommend to folks? I mean, is it, I think this is your first time

you said you were invited. So how did you find the overall conference experience compared to you were just at Dialogue24, which is purely like an array language conference? I probably shouldn't say this, but the conference chair throws a hell of a party. Well, we are right now outside a music bar, which is so, I wouldn't say rowdy, but it's just very loud and a lot of people inside that we have to come outside in order to have this conversation. So a dialogue doesn't do anything. They don't do music bars or anything like that. Dialogue was fun, but hasn't this whole thing been just a great party? Oh, no.

Yeah. I can't recommend. I think all functional conferences in general are like, they're the array language cousins or siblings or something. Like, you know, when you go to an array language conference, it's your people. But the functional folks, they're just as curious as the array language folks. And so as opposed to going to conferences that are sort of more mainstream languages like Python, C++, Java, et cetera, those conferences are amazing in their own way. But it's more that like you're opening people's eyes at those conferences, whereas here, people are super curious and ready to pick up anything.

And also, too, being set in Cadiz, which I think the locals pronounce as Cadiz. I'm not sure if you can do it better. Cadiz. Cadiz. So, yeah, it's this peninsula on the coast of Spain that seems to be like a vacation destination place, which is surrounded by ocean on all sides. It's been absolutely gorgeous weather the entire time we've been here. Yeah. So I mean, what more could you want from the location of a

conference? Should we do a rake? Well, that was the other, that's the final topic we need to talk about. We were chatting about before we started recording here about the prospects of an ArrayCon. We've alluded to it on the ArrayCast at times. Is this something we should just go ahead and do? What's the status of ArrayCon 2020X? I've only just thought of this, so you're hearing it here first. We should do it back to back with LambdaWorld. Why have I actually never had this thought?

I wonder if I'll keep this silence in because that's actually a fantastic suggestion. I don't know why I've never thought of something like this but that is exactly what a bunch of other conferences do. So I think I'm not sure if RacketCon now is a full-blown conference,

but there is a bunch of smaller community conferences that will co-locate with other conferences. I know that Strangeloop, while they had their conference up and running, it's shut down now. Rest in peace, Strangeloop. Never got to go. But they would always have these one-day or two-day conferences that would prefix for folks. That is a brilliant idea. Lambda World, is that what we're going to try and do next year? Sure. And they've got a great organization.

They've really put on a great party here. Like you're saying, smart, curious people. If we could hit your star, we could do a great ArrayCon right next to it. That's actually a really fantastic idea. We were already talking. Should we start an ArrayCon, or should we just slowly try and start to take over Lambda World? Because you gave a talk on arrays.

I gave a talk on function composition, but the languages I focused on were array languages. Camilla Shevchek, she gave a talk, attendee of Iverson College back in August and also a former guest of ArrayLanguage is. Camilla Shevchek, she gave a talk, attendee of Iverson College back in August and also a former guest of ArrayCast. Anyway, so it was four people, and I think there was a fifth, correct? Who am I missing?

This was from Habla Computing talking about functional working KDB, I think. Yes, that was the one-and-a-half-hour workshop yesterday, right? Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, that was from Habla Computing. So, yeah, if you include workshops, technically, I had a workshop as well that was on tacit programming in array languages. So, anyways, we had two workshops, four talks, and I think we actually had a bunch of folks from the Habla Computing company, and KX was a sponsor of this conference.

So, if there was a conference that we were going to co-locate with, this might be the one. So we will have to talk to... I haven't seen Louis here, the organizer. I was hoping to interview him because it's always good to chat with the organizers. The next thing once you turn the microphone off is we'll go talk to him.

All right, let's do that. This is the best idea I've heard in weeks, folks. In weeks. Thank you so much, Stephen. When's the next time we're going to bump into each other in person? It might be a while. November, isn't it? We're doing the next Raycast.

That's virtually, though. So physically in person, it could be until 2025 sometime. Who knows? Who knows? See you down the road. I mean, it's been a pleasure seeing you. We met for the first time in August, and then we saw each other again a month and a half later here.

So it's been a blast bumping into you. And we are going to go talk to someone about a raycon 2025 folks be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at adspthepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode as well as a link to a get up discussion where you can leave thoughts comments and questions thanks for. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. Low quality, high quantity. That is the tagline of our podcast. It's not the tagline. Our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information.