This week at the St. Louis Lambda Lounge, we’ll get a double-dose of functional programming and it should be a great night. The meeting is on Thursday March 5th at 6 pm at the offices of our kind hosts, Appistry. As always, the meeting is free and open to all.

First up we’ll have Ken Sipe, well-known speaker and author, giving us the rundown on F#, the new functional object hybrid language from Microsoft. I’ve seen Ken speak a bunch of times and he’s always worth seeing, as you’d expect from a No Fluff Just Stuff tour veteran.

I’ve been looking at a lot of F# lately and I find it to be a really impressive language. It reminds me in many ways of Scala, which is walking vaguely similar territory by pushing a hybrid functional approach on the JVM. F# comes out of the OCaml tradition. We saw Ryan Senior give us a great introduction to OCaml at the December meeting. I have no doubt that Ken will give us a great intro and some interesting opinions on FP as well.

Following that we’ll have the incomparable and ineffable Michael Easter doing a talk with the curious title “Monads are Burritos”. What does it mean? Will Michael pierce the veil of monadic obscurity with a new metaphor based on the flour tortilla of spicy goodness? You won’t know if you don’t check it out. I expect we’ll see some Haskell in this talk (for the first, but certainly not the last time at a Lambda Lounge) and I’m confident Michael’s talk will enlighten and entertain.

If you’re in the St. Louis area, a geek would be hard-pressed to find a juicier night of entertainment. That is of course, unless you happen to be partaking in the NFJS Gateway Software Symposium this weekend where Ken and many other fabulous speakers will be doing their thing. If you’re coming in from the outlying areas, why not come in one night earlier and get a free teaser? Everyone is welcome….

If you can’t catch us this month, meetings are the first Thursday of every month and we’ve got lots more great talks already scheduled.