Announcing the creation of Southern California Functional Programmers (SoCalFP), a group for people in LA, Orange County, and San Diego to meet in person and/or virtually to discuss, debate, present, and learn about functional programming concepts and techniques in various languages.

You might ask, "why a functional programming group in Southern California?"

Well, SoCal, wake up and smell the lambda. There's increasing interest in bastions of functional programming like Haskell and various Lisps; popular mainstream languages like Ruby and Python have lambda (or lambda like) capabilities; hybrid OO/functional languages like F# and Scala are generating buzz; C# 3.0 has embraced core functional ideas like closures and monads; and even staid, conservative Java may get some functional goodness in the next version. Perhaps most importantly, programmers can't ignore the oncoming multi-core freight train and Erlang has shown that concurrency and functional programming go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

If you're intrigued come visit our main site and join our mailing list.