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The inaugural meeting of the St. Louis λ-Lounge was held at Appistry this evening.

More than thirty people came. Alex Miller from Terracotta lead the opening discussion. Matthew Taylor from Spring Source showed two meta-programming techniques in Groovy. Ryan Senior did an introduction to OCaml.

Mark Volkmann will talk about Clojure in the January meeting. Mario Aquino volunteered a talk about writing iPhone applications or Widgets.

The vision of the group is to pull together the people who are interested in alternative languages that won't viably form individual dedicated user groups. Functional programming and dynamic languages are the focal points. Essentially, its a place where we can talk about things like tail-call optimization, closures, continuations, duck typing, meta-programming protocols, type inferences, monads, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem without being ridiculed.

It was a bit long, from 6:00pm to about 9:00pm. But its fun.

Overheard at the meeting:

• Ten years ago, we gathered to get into Java. Now we are getting away from Java.
• XSLT should count as a functional language.
• Is there a web framework for OCaml.
• Can I use your meta-programming techniques to subvert DRM.
• The Office-based joke that I didn't get (something about pennies from accounts.)
• I follow you on twitter. I follow you too.
• I still haven't gotten over the fact that both Symbolics and the LSI went out of business.