Hello,

During this evening, held jointly with OSHUG, we look at the latest in open source programming languages. Three talks from three highly respected speakers

Note. We are in the new BCS London offices at 25 Copthall Ave EC2R 7BP.

Register at https://ossg211119.eventbrite.co.uk/

Tea/coffee will be served from 6:00pm, with the talks from 6:30pm. Each talk will last around 30 to 45 minutes including any questions.

We shall be livestreaming and recording the talks for later posting on YouTube via GoToWebinar. Please register at:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2652791007348976652

An introduction to Perl6 Simon Proctor

An introduction to the newest version of Perl with an emphasis on some neat features.

With 17 years as a professional web developer (in a range of languages) and over 30 years of doing it for fun Simon Proctor has just about started to understand what he’s doing. He’s on occasion been known to take things seriously.

Julia – A fresh approach to numerical computing Avik Sengupta

In this talk, Avik will demonstrate how Julia combines dynamic, high level source with a high performance runtime code. He will show what makes Julia unique among programming languages, and how it enables high quality numeric computing libraries. He will survey the machine learning / deep learning ecosystem in Julia, and talk about how that can be extended to new kinds of modelling using differentiable programming. The talk will begin as an introduction to the language, and finish by showing how it opens up new paradigms of computing.

Julia is the fastest high performance open source computing language for data, analytics, algorithmic trading, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and many other fields. Julia solves the two language problem by combining the ease of use of Python and R with the speed of C++.

Avik Sengupta is the head of product development and software engineering at Julia Computing, contributor to open source Julia and maintainer of several Julia packages. Avik is the author of Julia High Performance, co-founder of two artificial intelligence start-ups in the financial services sector and creator of large complex trading systems for the world’s leading investment banks. Prior to Julia Computing, Avik was co-founder and CTO at AlgoCircle and at Itellix, director at Lab49 and head of algorithmic solutions at Decimal Point Analytics. Avik earned his MS in Computational Finance at Carnegie Mellon and MBA Finance at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore.

Evolving Languages: 5 Steps to Go Charles Forsyth

Go is the latest of a sequence of closely related concurrent programming languages: Squeak, Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo and Go. Each one strictly followed its predecessor, they occupy a similar space (CSP-inspired concurrent languages), and all but Squeak have a vaguely similar syntax, perhaps suggesting gradual refinement and incremental evolution. I take a closer look, revealing their significant differences, especially in in type systems and run-time environments, reflecting the effect of different design choices to satisfy the requirements of a larger, surrounding system.

Dr Charles Forsyth is a founder and Technical Director of Vita Nuova, which specialises in systems software and distributed systems.

He is interested in compilers, operating systems, networking (protocols and services), security, and distributed systems and algorithms. He specialises in the design and implementation of systems software, from low-level drivers through compilers to whole operating systems. He has published papers on operating systems, Ada compilation, worst-case execution analysers for safety-critical applications, “resources as files”, and the development of computational grids.