Thinking about Meeting Number Two

May 30, 2007 on 4:03 pm | By Neil | In |

Well, the first meeting of the Haskell User Group was, I think, a great success. Simon’s talk was fascinating, as were the discussions in the pub afterwards.

However, I’d like to see if we can do better. Some of the feedback suggested that the talk went over some people’s heads, which is understandable since I think we had a number of Haskell newbies in the audience, and even a few who were merely Haskell-curious. I really would like the LHUG to be inclusive of those people, so I would hope that next time we can have a better mixture of introductory material along with some of the more advanced stuff.

Here’s my suggestion for next time. Rather than one marathon talk, lets have two short talks, perhaps just 20 to 30 minutes long. Ideally one of these would be more introductory while the other one is a little more advanced. After that I propose a debate on the subject:

“Why isn’t functional programming more widely used in industry?”

To get the ball rolling on the talks, I can offer to talk on the subject “XML Processing with HXT and Arrows”. Please have a think about whether there is anything you would like to talk about, and send in your suggestions. Hopefully you’ll come up with better ideas than mine, so I don’t have to stand up and speak.

You’ll notice on the sidebar of this site there is a poll about the frequency of HUG meetings. I know we did a show of hands during the first meeting, which indicated strong support for a monthly meeting, but I have since been persuaded that that might be overdoing it. The initial energy and excitement of a new user group can quickly dissipate, so let’s give everybody some time to contemplate the previous meeting before rushing into the next one each time. I think the talks and discussions will feel a lot fresher with a bi-monthly or quarterly meeting. Anyway, place your vote, or comment below, and we’ll go with whatever the majority decide.

3 Comments

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  1. The Perl community goes even further with the “short talk” idea: they sometimes have sessions consisting entirely of five-minute “lightning talks”. I can thoroughly recommend the practice: it’s very interesting for the audience (the format forces the speakers to trim away *all* the fat from their talks, the pace is kept high, and if you don’t like this talk, there’s another one along in three minutes and thirty-two seconds…), and it’s a good way of breaking new speakers in gently (particularly if you copy London.pm, and buy all new speakers a pint afterwards :-) ). Mark Fowler wrote an excellent article on preparing lightning talks.

    Even if you don’t go that far, I find conferences with lots of short talks are usually a lot easier to follow than conferences with long talks. YMMV, of course.

    Monthly meetings are probably less forgettable than bi-monthly meetings, even with email reminders. IIRC, London.pm have monthly social meetings (pub full of Perl hackers), and bi-monthly technical meetings (presentations etc) - maybe something like that would work. More generally, there are a lot of language usergroups in London (Perl, Python, Java, Ruby…), who would probably be very happy to share their experiences and pub databases - have you talked to any of them?

    Comment by Miles Gould — May 30, 2007 #

  2. I would be happy to give an accessible talk on making music with Haskell. Somewhere around 20 mins plus questions would be fine.

    We could also debate “why isn’t functional programming more widely used in the arts”, although I suppose the arts is an industry :)

    Comment by Alex McLean — May 31, 2007 #

  3. Since the majority voted for monthly meetings I guess we should have one next week. Are there any plans for this meeting?

    Comment by Lennart Augustsson — June 18, 2007 #

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