Public Talk by Damian Conway about the Raku programming language

Dear Colleagues,

While Damian Conway will be in town next week for his now traditional series of classes, he will also give a public talk about the Raku programming language (also known as Perl6). It is likely to be interesting to many of you... and certainly good fun as well.

It will take place in the Amphi at the Biophore building on the UNIL Dorigny campus, on Thursday 12 March between 9:30 and 11:30.

Title: On the Shoulders of Giants: 400 Years of Raku

Abstract:
Raku is a new and astonishingly powerful dynamic multiparadigm programming language. Though it was only officially released in 2015, it has actually been in development for well over four centuries.

In this presentation, Dr Damian Conway (one of the core designers of Raku) will demonstrate some of the language’s most useful, convenient, efficient, and just-plain-scary new features, by tracing the entire history of modern computing: from the heroine of Regency Era number theory, to the boffin whose crazy theory won the war, to the champions of free-love non-determinism in the psychedelic ’60s, to the sub rosa inventor of modern encryption, to the enigmatic rōshis of declarative quantum computation.

Along the way, we’ll explore the world’s least-obvious sequence; the world’s first sorting algorithm; the world’s worst sorting algorithm; the art and science of just guessing; how to write Lisp in any language; the joy of subscripts; feline drug abuse; the world’s worst sorting algorithm...optimized; the perils of high precision; the advantages of anonymity; Leonardo’s reward; Monte Carlo, Monty Hall, and Monty Python; and how to pack your bags more efficiently by destroying the entire universe (and possibly several others we passed along the way).

Very best,
SCITAS Team & Swiss Institut of Bioinformatics