Upcoming F# events - learn Suave, FsLab & more!

Some people in the F# community have reputation for traveling too much. I do not know how that is possible, but as it happens, I will be visiting a couple of places in June and doing a number of talks, workshops and courses. So, if you are thinking about getting into F#, web development with F# using the amazing Suave library, playing with the new trendy F# to JavaScript compiler called Fable, or learning about the recent features in FsLab and Ionide, then continue reading!

The map includes all my travels, but not all of the pins are for F# events. I'm visiting Prague just to see my family (even though there is a new awesome F# meetup there) and my stop in Paris is attending Symposium for the History and Philosophy of Programming (although we might still do something with the local F# group too).

Philosophical questions about programming

Combining philosophy and computer science might appear a bit odd. The disciplines have very little overlap. Both philosophers and computer scientists get taught formal logic at some point in their undergraduate courses, but that's probably as close as they get.

But the fact that the disciplines do not overlap much might very well be the reason why putting them together is interesting. In an article about Design and Science, Joichi Ito (from MIT Media Lab), describes the term antidisciplinary and nicely summarizes why looking at such unusual combinations is worthwhile:

Interdisciplinary work is when people from different disciplines work together. But antidisciplinary is something very different; it's about working in spaces that simply do not fit into any existing academic discipline.

[When focusing on disciplines, it] takes more and more effort and resources to make a unique contribution. While the space between and beyond the disciplines can be academically risky, it (...) requires fewer resources to try promising, unorthodox approaches; and provides the potential to have tremendous impact (...).

As you can see from some of my earlier blog posts, I think the space between philosophy and computer science is an interesting area. In this article, I'll explain why. Unlike some of the previous posts (about miscomputation, types and philosophy of science), this post is quite broad and does not go into much detail.

At the danger of sounding like a collection of random rants, I look at a number of questions that arise when you look at computer science from the philosophical perspective, but I won't attempt to answer them. You can see this article as a research proposal too - and I hope to write more about some of the questions in the future. I wish antidisciplinary work was more common and I believe looking into such questions could have the tremendous impact that Joichi Ito mentioned.

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