I am starting a new user group in the St. Louis area called the Lambda Lounge. The Lambda Lounge is a monthly user group organized loosely around the idea of exploring dynamic and functional languages. More broadly, it’s an open forum to examine new advances in programming languages and libraries.

For a while now, there have been small islands of folks in the area talking about Ruby or Erlang or Groovy but none of those individual topics (except maybe Ruby) has quite the volume of people behind it to support a regular monthly meeting. This group is my attempt to gather the strands and bring together people with some overlapping interests into forum where we can all learn from each other.

I have been a full-time Java guy for a long time but it’s not uncommon these days for me to drop into Groovy or Ruby to solve a problem. I suspect that will become ever more common and useful, with the rise of VM-based languages, whether running on JVM, CLR, BEAM, or some other VM. As others have noted, it’s a wonderful time to be a language slut.

If you’re in the St. Louis or surrounding areas and would like to join, we will be having meetings on the first Thursday of the month, starting Thursday December 4th at 6 pm. Meetings are being graciously hosted by the kind folks at Appistry at their office on Olive in Creve Coeur. If you’re interested in presenting something (can be as short as 15 minutes), especially at the first meeting, please drop me a line.

Hope to see you all there. Please forward this link or reblog for anyone that might be interested in meetings that cover functional programming, Groovy, Erlang, Scala, Clojure, F#, Ruby, pattern matching, actor-based concurrency, invokedynamic, or pretty much any other related topic of interest!