Live-coding a Compiler: A Challenge

Have you ever wondered about how compilers work? I used to be scared of them. Big, complicated, magic programs. But they power our everyday lives and allow us to make the world a bit better with software. Oh, and it turns out there’s nothing magic to them. In this talk we’ll wander in the land of parsers, typecheckers and normalizations. We’ll demonstrate that a compiler fits what Clojure is best at: transforming data. And we’ll live-code a small little compiler of our own in Clojure, for the simplest computation device we have: lambda calculus.

About Fabrizio: Fabrizio is a Software Engineer from Sardinia (Italy), currently helping good journalism with good functional programming at KSF Media in Helsinki, Finland. Lately he’s into distributed systems, developer UX, and programming languages. In fact, he somehow ended up as a core contributor to the Dhall language. If you’d like to get him excited come talk and mention functional programming, fractals, electronic music, rockets, coffee or food.