Re: Guix world tour

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi!

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) skribis:

> I had the pleasant surprise to be invited to give a talk about Guix at
> the Scheme Workshop in September in Japan:
>
>   http://scheme2016.snow-fort.org/
>
> While I was at it, I submitted another talk to the Commercial(!) Users
> of Functional Programming conference, which was accepted:
>
>   http://cufp.org/2016/

I just came back and I’ve put the slides at:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/help/#talks

Apart from the usual overview, the Scheme Workshop talk covered mainly
staging and G-expressions.  There were ~30 people; I think it was pretty
well received.

After the talk, I chatted with Oleg Kiselyov (who unfortunately didn’t
attend) about the hygiene issue we have when composing gexps, and how
the MetaScheme PoC implementation just doesn’t apply to full Scheme with
macros.  He pointed me to papers about “staged notation definition” and
MacroML that I haven’t yet taken the time to investigate.

The CUFP talk was in this very nice room with 60 people or so.  I
focused on why and how we use Scheme extensively, explicitly comparing
to Nix{,OS}, which the majority of the attendance already knew.  Among
the questions I had, one was “how do I upgrade from Nix?” ;-), and
another one was the inevitable (given the venue) “what do you think a
static type system would bring you?”.

Videos should be available shortly.

It was a great experience, especially chatting with Scheme/Clojure/Lisp
and FP folks, famous or not!

Ludo’.