Closures: The next revolution in programming

Wednesday 6th September 2017, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Jules May

Venue: Room 4.31, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB.

This event is free of charge and open to all, but please book via Eventbrite

Refreshments and networking from 6:00 pm.

This meeting is supported by NCR.

Synopsis

In the 1950s Fortran released a great innovation into the world of software development: procedures. Suddenly, we could write programs orders of magnitude larger and more accurately than before. Then again, in the 1980s, Smalltalk and C++ introduced us to objects, and development took another great leap forwards. Now, at the start of the 21st century, another great leap forward is taking shape, and almost every language is adopting closures.

Closures really do introduce a whole new way of thinking about what programming is, and how to organise our code. In this talk, Jules will describe their beginning in Algol and functional languages, show how they work in modern languages, and demonstrate a few patterns and idioms that demonstrate their extraordinary power.

About the speaker

Jules is a freelance consultant based in North East Scotland. He specialises in reliability, mathematical software, and compilers and languages. He has been writing, teaching and speaking for 25 years, and conducts frequent lectures and workshops. He is currently working on a book “Programming like your life depends on it”, and is the originator of Problem Space Analysis.