Essential Languages: Nim, Scala, Python

Date: This event took place live on June 02 2015

Presented by: Matt Harrison, Andreas Rumpf, Jason Swartz



Duration: 3 hours

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Description: Host: Meghan Blanchette A solid grasp of programming language's core concepts is essential to writing concise, optimized and secure code. The three presenters today will give you insight into three different languages that could be the key to your next project. Andreas Rumpf, (creator of Nim) is going to outline the basics and detail when and why Nim is the right choice. Jason Swartz will talk about logging services, critical to highly available applications with Scala. Matt Harrison will round out the event with a session on how to use Python well when your project call for functional programming.

Introduction to Nim

Andreas Rumpf

In this talk I will give a basic introduction to the Nim programming language as well as a bit of the philosophy behind the language’s design followed by an emphasis on the meta programming facilities.

You will hear about:

The basics of the language including its syntax and builtin types.

We will see how Nim’s meta programming capabilities can be used to help us in debugging or testing Nim programs.

An outline of novel ideas on how to improve the state of the art for systems programming.

Andreas will also be speaking at OSCON this July, you can learn more about his talk here.

About Andreas Rumpf Andreas Rumpf is the creator of the Nim programming language, which is growing slowly but steadily. He is a software engineer working at 3DICC to incorporate Nim into their collaborative distributed 3D system. He has programmed in various programming languages over the years (including quite obscure ones) without being satisfied with any of them. Andreas Rumpf holds a degree in Computer Science which he obtained from University of Kaiserslautern. Website: http://nim-lang.org/

Building Logging Services With Scala

Jason Swartz

Logging and monitoring services are a critical part of HA (Highly Available) applications, and enable support teams to track and react to any problems encountered by users. In this webcast I will give a brief introduction to the Scala programming language and use it to create Logging services in a REST API. I'll cover some example uses of these services from shell scripts, including logging and monitoring from the command line.

Jason will also be giving a live tutorial at OSCON this July, you can learn more about his tutorial here.

About Jason Swartz Jason Swartz is a Software Engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area, developing Scala applications at Loyal3 and Netflix. Before making the switch to functional programming he managed the developer docs and support team at eBay, wrote advertising and merchandising platforms in Java and built tools and UI prototypes at Apple. Twitter: @swartzrock

Functional Programming & Python

Matt Harrison

Python supports several programming styles-imperative, object oriented, and functional. Most programmers are familiar with the former two. Functional programming appears to be coming back in vogue. Python has supported some functional constructs since version 1.4. This session will explore those features and some of the more modern Python features that tend to supersede them. Come learn how to be more functional, use less classes, and be more Pythonic.

Matt will also be speaking at OSCON this July, you can learn more about his talk here.