RubyC welcomes a new speaker: Kirill Timofeev!
RubyC is happy to welcome DataArt company among its sponsors, and Kirill Timofeev (Chief Architect in DataArt St Petersburg) as a conference speaker!
We honestly tried to find out as much as possible about Kirill and that’s what we came up with. It seems that once Kirill was a mathematician and spent lots of sleepless nights submerging vacuum cleaner's top end in the water, so he could make soap bubbles, hoping that after a hundred years or so, this idea (of course, if he is lucky enough) will lead to the development of upside-down street winegrapes irrigation, which obviously doesn't exist yet.
Now, using his unique experience, Kirill comes to RubyC with the topic “A trip to Lambda land”.
This decision he comments as follows: “I'd like to kidnap you and bring to my secret Ruby class. In fact, it won't be Ruby and even Rails but Lambda land. That's going to be an entertaining and mysterious journey through time and space to the External world to find ourselves, to find the truth. You'll be falling down, down, down a very deep well… Would the fall ever come to an end?
In the 1920-30s mathematicians needed a formal system aimed at providing the foundation for logic which would be more natural than existing theorems. λ-calculus' aim was to describe the most basic properties of function-abstraction, application and substitution in a very general setting. The pure λ-calculus, which had at first seemed shallow, turned out to be surprisingly rich.
So let's pretend I'm the Mister X (as in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76vJHKM8Tpo). Let's pretend I'm El Zorro fighting against cruel and greedy people. I'm Darth Vader and your father. Just take my hand Wendy, we are going to a trip to a magic and theoretical land.
This talk will briefly cover idea of λ-calculus, β-reduction, normal and applicative orders, then expand it to Y-combinator, and finally build kind of a primitive language which is enough to define a quick sort function. Knowing there is such a primitive, it will not only broaden your horizons on how languages are designed, but also might help you do functional refactoring of your code.”
Organizers hope that your brain won't be dead after this talk.