Announcing the creation of <a href="http://socalfp.blogspot.com/">Southern California Functional Programmers (SoCalFP)</a>,
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.<br><br>You might ask, "why a functional programming group in Southern California?"<br><br>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.<br><br>If you're intrigued come visit our <a href="http://socalfp.blogspot.com/">main site</a> and join our <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/socalfp">mailing list</a>.