Our next meeting is March 9 at 7 pm. at Spirent Communications.

Spirent Communications
900 Main Campus Drive, Suite 201
Raleigh, NC 27606
(map)

• Park in the parking deck west of the building
• Take stairs/elevator to second floor
• We'll meet in the "Lookout" conference room

David Cabana will present, "If monads are the answer, what was the question?"

The premise of the talk is that the best way to understand a tool is to understand the problem the tool is intended to solve. Monads are tools. What I want to do is to set up a simple programming problem which we will solve with real working code. By generalizing the solution to that problem we will have a context in which to define what a monad is, and how it can be used.

The intended audience is programmers with an interest in functional programming. Notice I said interest, not necessarily expertise. I will cover some basics (what a function is, what it means to compose functions) as part of setting up the problem to be solved.

Some points that may be of interest:

• No Haskell will be used. The code I'll present will be in Clojure, but the code is brief and easily translatable into any language capable of passing/returning functions as values. I'll put the code and slides online.
• No lambda calculus. No category theory. A little bit of high school algebra: it would be helpful to be recall a fact about logarithms: log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b). If you don't see how that is relevant to monads, come on in and find out.