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