This Thursday December 4th at 6 pm is the inaugural meeting of the St. Louis Lambda Lounge. The Lambda Lounge is a new user group for the discussion of functional and dynamic languages! In St. Louis, there are good places to go for popular languages like Java but it’s more difficult to find enough people to sustain a group for say, Erlang.

This group has an intentionally broad scope with the goal of exploring languages like Erlang, Scala, Clojure, Ruby, and whatever else we find interesting. I’m a Java dude but also interested in lots of other ideas and directions so I hope to see topics way outside my comfort zone.

The agenda for the first meeting is:

• What are functional and dynamic languages? – open discussion
• Groovy Metaprogramming with Categories and Mixins – Matt Taylor (G2One / SpringSource)
• Ocaml – Ryan Senior (Ferguson Consulting)

Should be a great first meeting! We’ve got a bunch of awesome suggested talks for future meetings already, so I sincerely hope this group will have enough juice to stick around for a long time. All are welcome and I look forward to seeing you there regardless of your experience level!