Topic: Blinking lights! And also two talks on programming languages.
Presenters: Mark Sidell and Jack Hill
When: Thursday, 13 June 2019 - 6:45pm to 9:00pm
Where: NCSU College of Textiles, 1020 Main Campus Dr., Room 2207
Parking: Underground parking deck immediately adjacent to the building (see map)
Map: Google Maps
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4bvBIASSU4
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/trilug/events/zmzvnqyzjbrb/

Summer is here, and soon we will begin the hurricane season. While we wait, how about if we have two presentations for the price of one?

Summary

"On the sorry state of modern programming languages and other rants, with some surprises" by Mark Sidell

I begin by explaining why I hate all modern programming languages, explore alternative, and then declare that PDP-8 assembly is really the best choice. Next, I briefly explore the PDP-8 instruction set, but switch gears to what every programmer really wants to do -- make lights blink. I demo blinkenlights on the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and finally on a replica of a PDP-8. Of course, the only thing the audience knows at the beginning is the title of the talk.

Bio

Mark started his career designing speech recognition hardware at a startup in Cambridge, MA, and then at Dragon Systems when it was a five-person company in a living room. Later he wrote the Forte Agent Usenet newsreader, which some folks might remember. Today he does software at Viasat, focusing mainly on the AWS cloud.

Summary

"Random Thoughts on Programming Languages" by Jack Hill

It is supposed to be random, so the summary will be up to whatever your mind makes it be. Focus on Clojure, Go, Haskell, Rust, or Scheme.

Bio

Jack is on the Systems team at Duke University Libraries, and is passionate about Free software, storage, and functional programming. When not thinking about computers, he cares about Catholicism, trains, fountain pens, amateur radio, and ultimate (frisbee).

Sponsor
TriLUG Members