[Oc-pm] Meeting Notes

[Ben Tilly]

On 5/24/07, David Romano <david.romano at gmail.com> wrote:
> Last night's meet up went pretty well! Three people showed up and it
> lasted for about an hour and a half. Doug Wilson, Peter Wilson, and I
> introduced ourselves to one another and talked a bit about our education
> and work histories. (Turns out we're all UC grads.) Doug came from
> Laguna Hills, and Pete and I came from Orange. The following are some of
> the things we talked about for the hour and a half we met:

I may sporadically be able to make these, but not until after my new
job starts next month.

[...]
>     -   How to fix the website
>         We talked briefly about Tilly's posting a few days ago, which
>         brought to mind how out-of-date it was. Doug has been the
>         maintainer for the website over the past few years, and he
>         confessed that he dropped the ball in maintaining it, especially
>         after accessing content on the server changed.  It used to be
>         you could just SSH in, but now it's something to do with WebDAV.
>         The next step is to find out the passwords to access the site
>         again, and change the content. Doug believes the passwords are
>         somewhere in his mail archives, and will try to scrounge them up
>         sometime before the next meeting.

I'll be glad to see that.

>     -   HOP & the Y Combinator
>         I brought HOP along with Programming Perl, and we discussed the
>         great ideas it contains, but lack of abstraction that the
>         Iterator* modules provide. We agreed that we usually just used
>         bits and pieces of what was described in the book, and morphed
>         it to suit the problem at hand. Doug mentioned that if you use
>         iterators and streams too much, you'll start to get memory leaks
>         because the new anonymous subs that it generates won't always be
>         destroyed properly by perl. This then segued into Pete's
>         understanding of the Y Combinator: an recursive anonymous
>         function generator that properly destroys the functions it
>         generates.  Pete even said that he had implemented the Y
>         Combinator in a language that's not Lisp (IIRC, Perl).
>         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_combinator

You can't really do the Y Combinator in Perl because one of the key
points of the combinator is that you should not need any form of
assignment, and Perl can't process function arguments without using
assignment.

That said, http://www.mail-archive.com/boston-pm@mail.pm.org/msg02716.html
walks through what the Y Combinator is and how one might arrive at it.
 I did it there in JavaScript, which is a language that many will find
fairly easy to read.

[...]

Cheers,
Ben