Halfway through the first day of our walking tour of New York, Paul tweets me while Sue and I are riding the Statten Island Ferry, can I extend my lightning talk to the N.Y. F# meetup on Tuesday evening? OK, it ended up making for a much better presentation. I spent the evening cutting down my Lambda Jam presentation to its essence, which I pretentiously titled “Semantically Coherent Functional Linear Data Structures”. The video is here This is the latest incarnation of the thoughts I’ve been trying to express since this blog post about the unity of linear purely functional data structures providing alternate composeable linear views and their capabilities.

I was followed by Rachel Reese’s excellent presentation on F# Agents.

NY Progressive F# Tutorials

Wendy and the Skills Matter crew put on a really nice conference For the NY Progressive F# Tutorials. This was my first experience with a Skills Matter conference, and it won’t be my last. Their reputation preceeds them, and now I can vouch they put on no-nonsense hands-on learning conferences for real practitioners. It helps that they get the best speakers. Don Syme’s keynote is captured on video, and the rest of the sessions on audio.

	Keynote: F# in the Open Source World Don Syme : 18th Sep 2013
	Calling and extending the F# compiler Don Syme and Tomas Petricek : 18th Sep 2013
	FCell: Numerical Development in Excel Tomas Petricek and Adam Mlocek : 18th Sep 2013
	Try F# from Zero to Data Science Rachel Reese and Phil Trelford : 18th Sep 2013
	F# Koans: An Interactive Way to Learn Chris Marinos : 18th Sep 2013
	Keynote: F# Beyond Windows Miguel de Icaza : 18th Sep 2013
	Graph Man Contest Richard Minerich and Paulmichael Blasucci : 18th Sep 2013
	Machine Learning with F# Phil Trelford and Mathias Brandewinder : 18th Sep 2013
	Code Quotations: Code-as-Data for F# Dmitry Mozorov and Jack Pappas : 18th Sep 2013
	Pac-Man Kata Phil Trelford and Mathias Brandewinder : 18th Sep 2013

The finale of the conference was Tyler Smith mopping the floor with me in the Pac Man AI programming competition, a group photo,

and dinner.

The F# conversations lasted until late in the night, I met some more of the international F# set, and once again the F# community was friendly, inclusive, and interested in progressing everyone’s skills and the state of the art.

After the F#

I was kindly invited to see the keynote of the next day’s conference, “Agile Testing & BDD Exchange”, by Gojko Adzic. If you have any interest at all in testing or user experience, I highly recommend this keynote.

Then I was off to the simultaneous Global GameCraft event in the Dumbo Spot annex to Dumbo Loft hosted by Andrea and Phil, where Phil Trelford gave me a personal tutorial on TickSpec, and I could take the time to work up a draft of this article.

Great Lakes Functional Programming Conference and more

I want to give a plug for the upcoming Great Lakes Functional Programming Conference in Detroit, MI on November 9. If you don’t already know, there is a vibrant functional programming community in Detroit, and kudos to Onorio Catenacci for organizing this.

My next talk is coming up on October 3 in San Francisco to the Bay Area Clojure User Group, “F# for Functional Enthusiasts”. Check it out if you are in the area.

Finally, I just have to pass on this little gem which spilled out of this year’s Strange Loop (darn! missed it again this year).