FringeDC informal meeting

Went for the first time last night to an informal meeting of the FringeDC group, for DC area residents interested in “fringe” programming languages, organized by the illustrious Conrad Barski. ’Twas a lot of fun—I met some cool people and talked about various interesting topics like introductory computer science pedagogy, continuation-based web applications, the possibility of breaking the Haskell IO monad into more restricted subsets of effects, and Arc. (I still think Arc is kind of silly, but at least now I better understand the philosophy behind it… =)

I’ll be giving a talk at the next (formal) meeting on March 22! (Assuming that I’m not off visiting a grad school…) I’m really looking forward to it. People seemed to be very interested in xmonad, so I’ll probably talk about that—something like Simon Peyton-Jones’ Taste of Haskell, except much shorter, for people who are already convinced they’re interested in Haskell, and with slightly more focus on showing off xmonad itself, rather than using it as a convenient vehicle for showing off Haskell. Or something like that.