λondon HUG

Video: Paradise, a DSEL for Derivatives Pricing

Here’s is the video from Lennart Augustsson’s talk on “Paradise, a DSEL for Derivatives Pricing”:

Here is the downloadable version (143Mb), playable with mplayer or VLC media player.

UPDATE: Here are Lennart’s slides (PDF).

Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop

[The following message is posted at the request of Simon Peyton-Jones]

Dear London Hugger

Below is a call for presentations for the 2008 Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop. Many of you are commercial users, and this call is for you! There is no paper, no proceedings — just come along and tell us your story.

Details below. Please consider offering a presentation (or nominating someone else!).

Simon

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.

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 30-45 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 jim (dot) d (dot) grundy (at) intel (dot) com or simonpj (at) microsoft (dot) com by 2 June 2008 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 2008 will last a full day and feature an invited presentation from Michael Hopcroft, the product unit manager for the forthcoming release of Microsoft Visual Studio F#. Additionally, the program will 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.

Program Committee

• Lennart Augustsson
• Matthias Blume
• Adam Granicz
• Jim Grundy (co-chair)
• John Lalonde
• Andy Martin
• Yaron Minsky
• Simon Peyton Jones (co-chair)
• Ulf Wiger

This will be the fifth CUFP, for more information - including reports from attendees of previous events - see the workshop web site:

http://cufp.functionalprogramming.com

Video: Darcs and GADTs

Here’s is the video from Ganesh Sittampalam’s talk on Darcs and GADTs.

Here is the downloadable version (125Mb), playable with mplayer or VLC media player, and here are the slides (PDF) (NB: Ganesh has corrected the “missing Maybe” mistake and there are a few bonus slides at the end).

Video: Design Patterns as Higher-Order Datatype Generic Programs

Here at last is the video from the November HUG. Many thanks to Dr Jeremy Gibbons of Oxford Computing Lab for coming to give this talk on Design Patterns as Higher-Order Datatype Generic Programs (slides in PDF format).

UPDATE: To download the video in FLV format (playable with mplayer or VLC media player) click here.

Jeremy Gibbons: Design Patterns as Higher-Order Datatype-Generic Programs

It’s meeting time again! The next meeting of the HUG will be on 14th November from 6:30PM at City University. Dr Jeremy Gibbons from the Oxford University Computing Laboratory will be giving a talk entitled Design Patterns as Higher-Order Datatype-Generic Programs. Here is the abstract:

Design patterns are reusable abstractions in object-oriented software. However, using current programming languages, these elements can only be expressed extra-linguistically: as prose, pictures, and prototypes. We believe that this is not inherent in the patterns themselves, but evidence of a lack of expressivity in the languages of today. We expect that, in the languages of the future, the code part of design patterns will be expressible as reusable library components. Indeed, we claim that the languages of tomorrow will suffice; the future is not far away. The necessary features are higher-order and datatype-generic constructs; these features are already or nearly available now. We argue the case by presenting higher-order datatype-generic programs capturing Origami, a small suite of patterns for recursive data structures.

See the venue page for details of how to get there. No specific room number has been allocated yet, so look out for signs or other recognisable Haskellers when you get there.

Nested Data Parallelism Video Returns!

As some of you noticed, Google Video deleted the video of Simon Peyton Jones’ talk on Nested Data Parallelism from our first meeting. Well, thanks to Matthew Sackman, we now have some new hosting and can provide the video ourselves. It should appear in the embedded flash player below. Please contact me if you have any problems viewing this.

Simon’s slides are here (PowerPoint). To download the video in FLV format (playable with mplayer or VLC media player) click here.

Videos

Nested Data Parallelism: Simon Peyton Jones
Slides are here (PDF).
Direct download here.

Games in Haskell: Matthew Sackman and Tristan Allwood
Slides are here (PDF).
Direct download here.

More videos coming soon…

Better Video for Games in Haskell

Thanks to Matthew Sackman, we can now provide the video of his talk (with Tristan Allwood) on Games in Haskell through the following embedded Flash player. This gives us much better control over the video quality compared with Google Video. Please let me know if you have any issues viewing this. As before, you can download the slides here.

NB: If you don’t have Flash installed, the direct download link is here. Linux users can play this with mplayer.

You may also have noticed that Google has deleted the video of Simon Peyton Jones’ talk on Nested Data Parallelism from our first meeting. I’m now working on getting that video online again.

Games in Haskell: Video now Available

The video of Matthew and Tristan’s talk on “Games” in Haskell is now online at Google Video. Their slides are here (PDF). Unfortunately the sound is not very high quality in this video… my apologies for that.

Many thanks to Matthew and Tristan. Also many thanks to Ross Paterson, who gave us a talk on fingertrees. There is no video of Dr Paterson’s talk, but his paper (with Ralf Hinze) is here.

Meeting reminder and abstract

Just a quick reminder that the next London HUG meeting is coming up on Thursday 20th September at City University from 6:30PM. Matthew and Tristan have sent me an abstract for their talk, as follows:

Take 2 PhD students who have never programmed in the IO Monad before, lock them in an office for 3 months, and let them loose with Haskell. In this talk we show our attempt at writing a classic tron game with a twist - and show some pitfalls we fell into and lessons learned. We then took some time to reflect, and decided to start to remake a nuclear war game, again with a twist - and will show our progress, plans and invite discussion on design idioms.

OpenGL demos included.”

Also, Dr Ross Paterson will be giving a talk on finger trees.

See you there!