Phil Nash presented his ideas on functional C++ to a packed ACCU meeting a couple of weeks ago. He kindly provided the slides on his website.
For the uninitiated, the functional style is often quite a shock, but having written F# for some time, I’m in favour of “modelling computations as evaluations of expressions” as Phil presented it, or the declarative style as it’s often described. I wrote about Higher-Order Functions in C++ recently and Phil touched on that as well.
One of the highlights of the talk was the section on persistent data structures, which share as much of the previous state as possible whenever additional elements are added. For example, an associative binary tree could have a new element added, but retain links to the bulk of the original tree. There are challenges to stay balanced, but often the benefits can be worth it (e.g. a red-black, persistent tree that’s thread-safe because all the data is immutable). Phil also presented a Trie hybrid with hashing – a persistent tree structure, with performance similar to unordered_map, for which the hashing ensures no re-balancing is required.
The finale was a demonstration of pipelining for C++, based on std::optional (available from C++17). The recommendation was to watch Eric Niebler’s Ranges talk from CppCon 2015 for more details.
This evening’s lecture at the IET was given by Chris Aylett of the Motorsport Industry Association. Chris gave a fast-paced overview of the work of motorsport engineers within their own industry and the increasing crossover into other sectors. He is a fan of horizontal innovation, the application of under-used skills and capacity within a firm to satisfy demand from clients in other industries. 
I was thrilled when the IET announced that they were organising a seminar on the 
The BCS hosted a presentation by Simon Taylor of Barclays Bank.
This was the first event I’ve attended by the F#unctional Londoners group and the venue at Skillsmatter.com was excellent. 
An opening address was given by the great nephew of Alan Turing, on behalf of TuringTrust.co.uk. This organisation builds on the legacy of Turing by distributing pre-owned computing equipment, both in the UK and particularly to schools in Africa who have no facilities.
then illustrated the rate of progress of Artificial Intelligence with reference to 
I was lucky to get an invite to this month’s ACCU London meet-up on the topic of sorting. Dietmar Kuhl hosted the presentation at the plush Bloomberg offices on Finsbury Circus. The talk brought together a sample of approaches to speeding up QuickSort:
musingstudio 