λondon HUG

Functional Programming Exchange

Skills Matter are running a one-day conference in London on Functional Programming on December 7th. Amongst others it’ll feature Haskell or Haskell-related talks by Duncan Coutts and myself (Ganesh Sittampalam) as well as a talk on Erlang by Matthew Sackman, who you may remember from his talk on games development some time back.

It’s not free, but it’s quite cheap especially if you book by this weekend. See here for more details.

Alex’s slides

Alex’s talk was great fun! Here are his slides, including some embedded video demos.

Next meeting: Alex McLean, Live coding music with Haskell

The next meeting of the London HUG will be on Thursday 17th September at 6:30pm at City University, with a talk by Alex McLean:

Live coding music with Haskell

Literacy, the ability to express ourselves in text, is a big part of what defines the modern human, and so perhaps programming languages are the most human of human-computer interfaces. While a large proportion of the commercial music software industry has been busy reproducing the hardware of a music studio in software, the free software community has developed new ways of making music with programming languages, with recent efforts focused on live coding environments like supercollider 3, ChucK, impromptu and
puredata.

Live coders take advantage of dynamic interpreters to improvise live music (and/or video) with sourcecode, using the computer language as a musical environment. A live code edit is something like changing the design of a machine while it runs, moving cogs and pistons around and adding new ones. Here though the machine is composed of text, describing the functions which the music flows out of. The musician’s editor is projected for the audience so that they see the live coder’s gestures within their text editor, and if they like, read the code as it is written.

In this talk Alex will show how he uses haskell to livecode music, including representing musical patterns, interfacing with synthesis software over the OSC network protocol, and using ghci as an interface in musical improvisation.

Next Meeting: Sean Leather, Fun and generic things to do with EMGM

The next meeting of the London HUG will be on Thursday July 9th at 6:30pm at City University:

Fun and generic things to do with EMGM

Generic programming has become a popular technique for reducing code and simplifying programs. There are many libraries for Haskell programmers that offer different approaches to generic programming. This talk introduces one such library, Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses (EMGM), that was uploaded to Hackage for the first time in September 2008. EMGM uses type classes to provide a sum-of-products representation of datatypes. Not quite as well-known as its cousin, Scrap Your Boilerplate, EMGM also provides a wealth of generic functions. Additionally, EMGM allows programmers to easily write their own generic functions and specialize any function for arbitrary datatypes. In this talk, we look at the building blocks of EMGM, at various generic functions provided by the library, how do define one’s own generic function, and at some potential uses.

Sean Leather is a PhD student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His research focuses on exploring libraries for generic programming in Haskell.

Don’s slides

Don has now posted his slides from last week’s talk on the Galois blog:
http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/04/27/engineering-large-projects-in-haskell-a-decade-of-fp-at-galois/

Thanks again for a great talk, Don!

Don Stewart: Engineering Large Projects in Haskell: A Decade of Haskell at Galois

Here’s the title and abstract for Don’s talk, on Monday 20th April from 6:30PM at City University:

Engineering Large Projects In Haskell:
A Decade of Haskell at Galois

Galois has been building systems in Haskell for the
past decade. This talk describes some of what we’ve learned about
in-the-large, commercial Haskell programming. With war stories from a
diverse set of projects, I’ll look at:

* When and where we use Haskell
* Correctness, productivity, scalabilty, maintainability
* What language features we like: types, types, types!
* The Haskell toolchain: compiler, libraries, build systems, etc.
* Being a commercial entity in a largely open source community

Don Stewart is an Australian hacker and an R&D lead at Galois, Inc,
based in Portland, Oregon. He has been involved in a broad range of
Haskell projects, with a focus on issues of performance and
scalability. He is co-author of “Real World Haskell”.

Don started using Haskell ten years ago, with MacGofer on the 68k Mac

Next Meeting: Don Stewart from Galois

The next meeting of the London Haskell User Group will be on Monday 20th April from 6:30PM at City University. Apologies for the short notice (again).

Don Stewart from Galois (and one of the authors of Real World Haskell) will talk about his experiences working on large, multi-engineer, multi-year projects in Haskell. Full title and abstract to follow.

As usual see the venue page for full location information.

This year’s CUFP workshop will be held in Edinburgh, along with ICFP as usual. Please do submit a talk proposal, you don’t need to write a paper or anything!

Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop (CUFP) 2009

Functional Programming As a Means, Not an End

Call for Presentations

Sponsored by SIGPLAN
Co-located with ICFP 2009

Edinburgh, Scotland, 4 September 2009
__________________________________________________________

Presentation proposals due 15 May 2009

http://cufp.galois.com/2009/call.html
__________________________________________________________

Functional languages have been under academic development for
over 25 years, and remain fertile ground for programming
language research. Recently, however, developers in industrial,
governmental, and open-source projects have begun to use
functional programming successfully in practical applications.
In these settings, functional programming has often provided
dramatic leverage, including whole new ways of thinking about
the original problem.

The goal of the CUFP workshop is to act as a voice for these
users of functional programming. The workshop supports the
increasing viability of functional programming in the
commercial, governmental, and open-source space by providing a
forum for professionals to share their experiences and ideas,
whether those ideas are related to business, management, or
engineering. The workshop is also designed to enable the
formation and reinforcement of relationships that further the
commercial use of functional programming. Providing user
feedback to language designers and implementors is not a
primary goal of the workshop, though it will be welcome if it
occurs.

Speaking at CUFP

If you use functional programming as a means, rather than as an
end, we invite you to offer to give a talk at the workshop.
Alternatively, if you know someone who would give a good talk,
please nominate them!

Talks are typically 25 minutes long, but can be shorter. They
aim to inform participants about how functional programming
played out in real-world applications, focusing especially on
the re-usable lessons learned, or insights gained. Your talk
does not need to be highly technical; for this audience,
reflections on the commercial, management, or software
engineering aspects are, if anything, more important. You do
not need to submit a paper!

If you are interested in offering a talk, or nominating someone
to do so, send an e-mail to francesco(at)erlang-consulting(dot)com
or jim(dot)d(dot)grundy(at)intel(dot)com by 15 May 2009 with a
short description of what you’d like to talk about or what you
think your nominee should give a talk about. Such descriptions
should be about one page long.

Program Plans

CUFP 2009 will last a full day and feature a keynote
presentation from Bryan O’Sullivan, co-author of Real World
Haskell. The program will also include a mix of presentations
and discussion sessions. Topics will range over a wide area,
including:
* Case studies of successful and unsuccessful uses of functional
programming;
* Business opportunities and risks from using functional languages;
* Enablers for functional language use in a commercial setting;
* Barriers to the adoption of functional languages, and
* Mitigation strategies for overcoming limitations of functional
programming.

There will be no published proceedings, as the meeting is
intended to be more a discussion forum than a technical
interchange.

This will be the sixth CUFP, for more information - including
reports from attendees of previous events and video of recent
talks - see the workshop web site: http://cufp.galois.com/
__________________________________________________

Lemmih: LHC - past, present and future

Here’s the abstract for Friday’s talk:

GHC is the undisputed master of high-level Haskell optimizations. With its fine-tuned simplifier and user-programmable rewriting rules, GHC has shown that Haskell can be very competitive when it comes to performance. However, woefully little attention has been directed at low-level optimizations which are becoming more significant as high-level optimization opportunities become scarce.

This talk is about the LHC Haskell Compiler and how it attempts to bring another level of optimizations to Haskell programs. I will cover why LHC was created, how far we’ve come with its development and what features we’re aiming at including.

Next Meeting: Lemmih (David Himmelstrup) on LHC

The next meeting of the London Haskell User Group will be on Friday 20th February from 6:30PM at City University. Apologies for the short notice.

Lemmih (David Himmelstrup) will be talking about LHC, a recent fork of the JHC compiler. Full title and abstract to follow.

As usual see the venue page for full location information.