λondon HUG

AngloHaskell 2008

ganesh — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 05:16:33 +0000

The 2008 AngloHaskell meeting will be held at Imperial College in London on Friday August 8th and Saturday August 9th. The precise format is still being discussed, but the first day will be more focussed on talks and the second day on general discussion, hacking and socialising, following the successful format of 2006 and 2007. You don’t have to come for the whole time.

Please do come along - you can find full details and sign up here. Please do offer talks too - it’s generally quite a relaxed atmosphere and you don’t need to be a Haskell guru to have something to contribute.

Erlang Exchange User Groups session

ganesh — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:12:46 +0000

The Erlang Exchange 2008 conference will include a “user groups” session tomorrow (i.e. Thursday 26th June) evening at 6pm. This session will be free to attend as long as you register first using the form on the webpage. Several London programming language user groups will be giving brief (15 minute) presentations - I’ll be talking about “Concurrent and Multicore Haskell”, drawing heavily on Bryan O’Sullivan’s talk to the BayFP user group last month.

Apologies for the short notice.

Next meeting: Paradise, a DSEL for derivatives pricing

ganesh — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:42:51 +0000

The next meeting of the London Haskell User Group will be on Wednesday 25th June from 6:30PM at City University. Lennart Augustsson from Credit Suisse will be talking about his work there:

Creating a new pricing model for a financial derivative model consists of plumbing together generic low level analytics and creating a user friendly interface for the model.

The low level analytics is typically written in C++ and the user interface is often Excel.

We have developed a domain specific embedded language in Haskell for creating pricing models.

The programmer of the pricing model make a high level description of how to put the analytics together and what the user interface should look like, and from this the pricing model is generated.

I’m not sure if Neil will be available to video it this time, so if anyone else has the required equpiment and would like to volunteer to do so, that’d be great!

Edit: I’d accidentally disabled comments on this post. Now fixed, just in case anyone was desperate to make one!

Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop

Neil — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:24:44 +0000

[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

Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop (CUFP) 2008

26 September 2008, Victoria, British Columbia

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS

Presentation proposals due 2 June 2008

http://cufp.functionalprogramming.com

Functional Programming As a Means, Not an End
Sponsored by SIGPLAN

Co-located with ICFP 2008

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