ACCU Online: The ABC++ of Programming and Polymorphism
10 May 2021
ACCU 'local' online events is pleased to welcome Richard Park who will be telling us about A Programming Language and Phil Nash who will fill in languages from B to C - and beyond - while presenting 'Polymorphism À La Carte'
The event will be hosted, virtually, on Remo. This will also give us the social and networking aspect of meet-ups that we miss from the in-person version.
When: Thursday, 20th May 2021, 19:00 start.
Duration: Around 2 hours.
Where: A link to the event will be sent to those who RSVP as attending nearer the time.
To attend: Please sign up on the ACCU London event page: https://www.meetup.com/ACCULondon/events/277980280
Programme (times are approximate):
19:00 Intro and News
19:10 A Programming Language for Thinking about Algorithms - Richard Park
Being able to code isn't enough. You have to be able to reason about your algorithms if you want to get them right. Just like the symbolic notation of traditional mathematics allows you to think about your formulas, so too, a programming language inspired by traditional mathematical notation can aid your thinking about problems and the code used to solve them.
This session presents APL and its benefits for high-level development and comparison of algorithms, leading to an intuition about performance, for example in the context of memory access and amenability to GPU computing.
20:00 Break
20:15 Polymorphism À La Carte - Phil Nash
If we've been using C++ family languages (including Java, C#, D etc) we may have a narrow idea of how polymorphism works. In this talk we'll present several different ways to do polymorphism, in a few different languages, along with their respective trade-offs, and conclude that, ideally, we'd have access to several approaches so we can pick the right one for the moment. Clojure does just that, coining the term Polymorphism À La Carte, and we'll hint at a C++ library that can do so, too. We'll do this in the context of the historical family tree of languages that C++ grew up in.
21:00 Talks end -- socialising in Remo
About the speakers:
Richard Park works for Dyalog, a modern APL implementor, teaching both novices and more experienced users about traditional and modern APL.
Phil Nash is the original author of the C++ test framework, Catch2, and composable command line parser, Clara. As Developer Advocate at JetBrains he's involved with CLion and ReSharper C++. He's also the organiser of C++ London and C++ on Sea, as well as co-host and producer of the cpp.chat podcast. More generally he's an advocate for good testing practices, TDD and using the type system and functional techniques to reduce complexity and increase correctness. He's previously worked in Finance and Mobile offers training and coaching in TDD for C++.
