Lambda the Ultimate

Not "we're all so geeky we're dysfuctional", if that's the worry! You can tell, most of the people attending AngloHaskell'll be rather more able to hold down a job than I am.

There are some ways in which Haskell's strengths and weaknesses interact with those due to Asperger's, and some interactions with at least some of my coping mechanisms. There are also a number of things I suspect are fairly common geek experiences which may perhaps be written large in my case. One way or another they add up to make Haskell one of the most productive languages I can attempt to work in at the moment.

Basically I think it's an interesting angle to do a "human factors" talk from and talk about some of the thought and modelling processes involved in hacking Haskell code.

There're also a couple of interesting points about potential traps in getting things done that Haskell makes it easy for me to back out of, but explaining them here would rather spoil the talk. I'll see what can be done about slides and the like after the event though!

Sounds interesting. I couldn't make the meetup, so do you have slides you could make available?

I'm pretty wiped after the weekend, so it'll take a while to get in contact with the other speakers and get anything permanent up. In the meantime my slides're at link removed - though I intend to break that link at some point in the future. Will add a comment once there's more on the wiki.

eta: Link removed, slides now at http://www.flippac.org/talks/aspie.pdf

We've now got slides available, linked from the Abstracts section at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/AngloHaskell/2007#Abstracts.

Your mentioning of mutual embedding of DSLs reminded me of Formal Islands, which already appeared on LtU many times (but I guess never as a story).

Interesting, will read more later. Haskell's syntax is generally good enough to get away without anything on the grammatical level right up until you need a new binding structure - if you don't mind programming pointlessly, you can do anything you like! One of the things to play with on my back-burner is doing something of a taxonomy of mutually-embedded DSLs and looking into the kinds of binding structures that're useful, see if there's a corresponding taxonomy of bindings (which I suspect there probably is).