YOU WERE EATEN BY A GRUE - Audience Level: Advanced

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Thinking about the practical applications of immutable data, almost certainly the least useful and most ridiculous thing would be a processor itself - or indeed - an entire virtual computer!

In this talk, you will discover an entirely immutable F# implementation of a virtual machine, Infocom's legendary 1979 Z-Machine. A stroke of brilliance in a fast emerging new computer game scene, the Z-Machine was one of the first successful commercial applications of a virtual machine and rightfully took a spot as one of the big landmarks of computer game history.

In today's even faster moving world of technology and languages, you can still learn a few lessons from this dusty, mostly forgotten relic. Modern computing lingo would perhaps call the Z-Machine a "domain specific computer"™. A similar concept is still used today in large game engines, though this style of computing is mostly unknown and unfamiliar. Perhaps inspiration can be drawn from such a paradigm? At any rate, the idea of an immutable computer is completely ridiculous - or is it?

The author categorically denies that any squirrels and / or type providers were harmed during the development of this software and / or talk.

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