Sessions at Strange Loop 2011 with slides on Sunday 18th September

Clojure is a new dynamic programming language for the Java Virtual Machine. Clojure introduces innovative ideas around state management and concurrency, while inheriting the best ideas from the long history of Lisp-like languages. It is a language designed to solve real problems, some of which are so pervasive in current programming practice that we don’t even recognize them as problems. This workshop will provide an introduction to Clojure’s syntax and key concepts, with examples of how they can make a real impact in large, complex systems.

A whirlwind tour of the Erlang language. This session will be based loosely on Chapter 2 from Erlang and OTP in Action. This tour will serve to teach Erlang to any very astute developers that don’t know it yet and be a nice refresher for those that already know it to some degree. Even advanced users should be able to take some new information on the Erlang language itself out of this session.

This workshop covers intermediate topics for Android developers such as:

• Network I/O
• Multi-threading and asynchronous programming
• Background services, notifications
• Hard and soft caching
• View optimization
• Content providers and databases
• Geolocation
• Metadata and EXIFs
• Animations
• Common Android Intents
• Exception handling

You may be surprised to see how each of these techniques can pop up simply by working with images and multimedia in an Android application. The speaker will explain each of these techniques and talk about the real world situations that he has used them while working on two of the most popular apps on the Android Market, eBay Mobile and Bump, and while co-authoring the book Android in Practice.

Modern programming presents a daunting array of challenges: proliferating technologies, messy inputs, unreliable networks, huge volumes of data, how to verify that results are correct, making it all fast enough. The Haskell programming language is well suited to addressing this broad range of needs, as it uniquely combines conciseness, safety, and high performance.

In this fast-moving, interactive tutorial we will learn Haskell by developing a realistic analytic application: we’ll crawl a web site and rank its pages in order of authority. This combines some very modern concerns: network programming; handling dodgy HTML; big data; and number crunching. With our emphasis on getting real work done, we’ll show off some of Haskell’s compelling features and demonstrate how they help us to develop dependable, easy to understand code.

Django is a high-level web development framework designed for rapid development of database-backed web sites. This tutorial is designed to introduce developers to Django and to give a taste of how Django development usually “feels”. My main goal is to give a holistic impression of Django’s abilities and style: by the end, attendees should be able to decide if Django’s a good fit for them.

A high-level outline:

• Introduction, philosophy, and basic terminology.
• Models, the model API, metadata and relationships.
• Django’s admin interface.
• Views, URLs, and the request/response cycle.