The Little Typer study group


Last Tuesday, 20th November, we started a quite interesting (and really nerdy) new "study group" inside the "London Type-Driven Development Meetup": "The Little Typer Study Group".

The study group is focused on a recently released book "The Little Typer", MIT Press, hence the name, a new introductory book about dependent types and functional programming.

Why do we need dependent types ??

Ehm, that is an excellent question. To keep it simple, let's just say using some mathematics, logic and computer science (type theory) we aim to produce a more expressive, "easier" to reason about and much more robust code. I hope this is enough for now.

We will come back on the matter later since it will be the actual focus of the study group.

We created the first meeting mainly as a warm-up. The (good) idea was to put everyone on the same page:

everyone needed Racket and Dr.Racket IDE to be installed and working, or at least a version of Scheme or Lisp with the favourite editor (btw, the former option is the easiest, unless you already are a Scheme dev)

we focused on the first chapters of The Little Schemer for a fast-paced introduction to Scheme (or Racket or Lisp), cause we will need it later to work with 'The Little Typer'

Before closing this post (it was a while...) a couple of (hopefully) useful links:

I also created a repo in Github where I will try to keep track of all the code developed

Looking forward to the next session. See you there?