I’m going to be giving the February EdLambda talk! I’ll be talking about functional web programming, and more in detail about some F# language features such as computation expressions, asynchronous workflows, and type providers, along with functional web abstractions both old and new.

EdLambda is the Edinburgh functional programming meetup group. On the second Tuesday of the month, we all pop to The Outhouse pub, listen to an FP-related talk, and have a chat – if you’re around, you’d be most welcome to come along!

When: 7pm, Tuesday 10th February Where: The Outhouse pub Title: Functional Web Programming in Links and F#

Functional programming has been shown to be a good fit for web development. The Links functional web programming language developed by Cooper, Lindley, Wadler and Yallop at the University of Edinburgh allows client, server, and database code to be written in a single language, while providing abstractions such as formlets to allow form data to be retrieved in a structured, elegant and type-safe manner. More recently, these ideas have been picked up and expanded upon in IntelliFactory’s WebSharper web framework, which embeds many of the concepts in the .NET functional-first language F#.

In this talk, I’ll take a look at Links and WebSharper, comparing the approaches taken by each. In doing so, I’ll explore some of the language features of F# which make the embedding possible, revisit some web abstractions such as Formlets, and talk about some more recent abstractions such as Piglets (yes, Piglets).