[racket] RacketCon 2013 - attending: a new student (didn't say young), taking Coursera class on BSL/DrRacket (Univ. Brit. Columbia)

Hello from a new (not young) beginner --

I'm planning to attend RacketCon [1], and am currently working on the
Coursera class offering [2] from the University of British Columbia (UBC)
by Prof. Gregor Kiczales: Introduction to Systematic Program Design - Part
1, which uses the BSL in DrRacket.  We're steered informally and
occasionally to the HtDP/2e [3].

This note just to say if at that conference there's any informal way to
meet with like-minded "bystanders", I expect I'd find that interesting ...
(lunch table, etc.)

I guess I'll go out on a limb here to say I was led to this course of study
by a working assumption (not yet proven) that my utter lack of functional
programming know-how would probably be nicely addressed by looking into
something like Racket, and from that experience I could return to what I
have been working on learning for all-things-web-purposes, namely
Javascript, and would then be in a stronger position to use its functional
approach capabilities.  Naive, perhaps.  I'm just getting underway, so lots
of things yet to be learned.

Enjoying the course, looking forward to the (over my head) conference.

Best,
William Reilly

[1]   http://con.racket-lang.org/
"*RacketCon* is a public meeting for everyone interested in Racket:
developers, contributors, programmers, educators, and by-standers."  Sept.
29, Boston.
[2]   https://www.coursera.org/course/programdesign
[3]   http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/
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