Scott Fraser, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Portico Systems
Date & Time/Location: 3-27-09, 1:45pm-2:45pm, Salon C
Scott has always known about the coming Robot Apocalypse. But only recently was he convinced, by a Functional Programming evangelist, that the deconstruction of the Imperative and Object Oriented programming paradigms that had dominated Scott's career for over 22 years might be imminent. Always paranoid about staying relevant, sure that the JVM was here to stay, and with many years of highly multithreaded high performance Java applications behind him, he sought a functional language that would work for him... and was led to Clojure.

Clojure is an exciting lisp dialect with baked in concurrency support. It's creator, Rich Hickey, was inspired by Haskell and ML, and hopes the language will play as "a dynamic language like Python, Ruby and Groovy", that is "as accessible as those languages", but also "as performant as Java and as useful in any context as you would Java". It sounded perfect. But could it subdue the robots?

Join Scott to learn about Clojure, and what it's creator calls it's "Four Legs":

functional programming
lisp
being hosted on the JVM
direct support for concurrency

And finally, see Real World Examples (tm) of using Clojure to control robots, for purposes of self defense, amusement of conference attendees, and otherwise.