Functional Geekery Episode 89 - Baishampayan Ghose

In this episode I talk with Baishampayan Ghose, better known as BG. We talk his entry into software development, exposure to Lisp, using Common Lisp, moving to Clojure, and much, much more.

Our Guest, Baishampayan Ghose a.k.a BG

@ghoseb on Twitter
ghoseb on Github

Conference Announcements

The O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference will be taking place April 2-5, 2017 in New York. Visit http://www.oreilly.com/pub/cpc/50017 to register and find out more, and use code USRG for 20% off most passes.

CycleConf will be taking place on the 21st-23rd of April. Visit cycleconf.com to find out more.

Call for presenters is now open for Velocity London 2017. Visit http://www.oreilly.com/pub/cpc/68627 for more information and to submit your proposal.

The Call for Presenters is now open for Software Architecture in London, UK. Visit http://www.oreilly.com/pub/cpc/68630 for more information and to submit your proposal.

flatMap(Oslo) is a FP-conference with focus on Scala and the JVM, taking place on May 2nd and 3rd in Oslo, Norway. Please go to http://2017.flatmap.no/cfp/ to learn more.

ElixirConf EU will be taking place on May 4th and 5th with tutorials on May 3rd. For more information visit: http://www.elixirconf.eu/

OSCON will be taking place May 8-11 in Austin, TX. For more information and to register visit: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/cpc/50016, and use code USRG for 20% off most passes.

LambdaConf 2017 will be taking place May 25th – 27th in Boulder, Colorado. Visit http://lambdaconf.us for more information.

Elm Europe will be taking place June 8th and 9th in Paris, France. Visit http://elmeurope.org/ for more information and to register.

ZuriHac 2017 will be taking place in Zurch on the 9th-11th of June. For more information, and to register visit https://zurihac.info/

O’Reilly Fluent Conference will be taking place June 19–22, 2017 in San Jose, California. Visit http://www.oreilly.com/pub/cpc/61309 to find out more and to register, and use code USRG for 20% off.

EuroClojure will be taking place in Berlin, Germany on July 20th & 21st. Visit http://2017.euroclojure.org/ for more information and to keep updated.

BusConf will be taking place the 3rd-5th of August in Frankfurt, Germany. Registration is open, and more information can be found at http://www.bus-conf.org/.

If you have a conference related to functional programming, contact me, and I will be happy to announce it.

Announcements

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein,
Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can
find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@6:30]

About BG
Helpshift
@helpshift on Twitter
Emacs
Emacs Lisp
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Common Lisp
Clojure
“Yet Another Lisp Dialect”
How BG got into software
Not having a computer around as a kid
“Which language should I learn?”
“Later I figured that SICP was teaching computer science, not software engineering”
Using Common Lisp “In Anger”
S-Expressions
“Too much syntactic sugar gives cancer of the semi-colon”
Power of Macros in Lisp
On Lisp
Jamie Zawinski and Netscape
Paul Graham
Common Lisp vs Clojure
gensym in Macros in Clojure
Starting a company based on Clojure in 2009
People coming into Clojure from a wide set of languages
Planet Clojure
Starting Planet Clojure
Stealing Planet Clojure to create Planet Erlang
@planetclojure Twitter
Rich’s talk “Language of the System”
Cross Pollination of ideas in Clojure
clojure.spec
What is on the radar around Clojure for Helpshift
What other Lisps look appealing
Racket
core.logic
miniKanren
Parsing with Derivatives
Thinking more in terms of systems than programs
BG’s keynote “The Post Modern Programmer” at PyCon India
Upcoming Appearances
Look for announcements on Twitter
IN/Clojure

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.