Lambda the Ultimate

Hi all,

The paper deadline is a few short weeks away, but thought some here might be interested in this call..

2nd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on
Functional Art, Music, Modelling and Design
http://functional-art.org

Gothenburg, Sweden; 6 September, 2014

The ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Art,
Music, Modelling and Design (FARM) gathers together people
who are harnessing functional techniques in the pursuit of
creativity and expression.

Functional Programming has emerged as a mainstream software
development paradigm, and its artistic and creative use is
booming. A growing number of software toolkits, frameworks
and environments for art, music and design now employ
functional programming languages and techniques. FARM is a
forum for exploration and critical evaluation of these
developments, for example to consider potential benefits of
greater consistency, tersity, and closer mapping to a
problem domain.

FARM encourages submissions from across art, craft and
design, including textiles, visual art, music, 3D sculpture,
animation, GUIs, video games, 3D printing and architectural
models, choreography, poetry, and even VLSI layouts, GPU
configurations, or mechanical engineering designs. The
language used need not be purely functional (“mostly
functional” is fine), and may be manifested as a domain
specific language or tool. Theoretical foundations, language
design, implementation issues, and applications in industry
or the arts are all within the scope of the workshop.

Submissions are invited in two categories:

* Full papers

5 to 12 pages using the ACM SIGPLAN template. FARM 2014
is an interdisciplinary conference, so a wide range of
approaches are encouraged and we recognize that the
appropriate length of a paper may vary considerably
depending on the approach. However, all submissions must
propose an original contribution to the FARM theme, cite
relevant previous work, and apply appropriate research
methods.

* Demo abstracts

Demo abstracts should describe the demonstration and its
context, connecting it with the themes of FARM. A demo
could be in the form of a short (10-20 minute) tutorial,
presentation of work-in-progress, an exhibition of some
work, or even a performance. Abstracts should be no
longer than 2 pages, using the ACM SIGPLAN template and
will be subject to a light-touch peer review.

If you have any questions about what type of contributions
that might be suitable, or anything else regarding
submission or the workshop itself, please contact the
organisers at:

workshop2014@functional-art.org

KEY DATES:

Abstract (for Full Papers) submission deadline: 7 May
Full Paper and Demo Abstract submission Deadline: 11 May
Author Notification: 30 May
Camera Ready: 18 June
Workshop: 6 September

SUBMISSION

All papers and demo abstracts must be in portable document
format (PDF), using the ACM SIGPLAN style guidelines. The
text should be in a 9-point font in two columns. The
submission itself will be via EasyChair. See the FARM
website for further details:

http://functional-art.org

PUBLICATION

Accepted papers will be included in the formal proceedings
published by ACM Press and will also be made available
through the the ACM Digital Library; see
http://authors.acm.org/main.cfm for information on the
options available to authors. Authors are encouraged to
submit auxiliary material for publication along with their
paper (source code, data, videos, images, etc.); authors
retain all rights to the auxiliary material.

WORKSHOP ORGANISATION

Workshop Chair: Alex McLean, University of Leeds

Program Chair: Henrik Nilsson, University of Nottingham

Publicity Chair: Michael Sperber, Active Group GmbH

Program Committee:
Sam Aaron, Cambridge University
David Duke, University of Leeds
Kathleen Fisher, Tufts University
Julie Greensmith, University of Nottingham
Bas de Haas, Universiteit Utrecht
Paul Hudak, Yale University
David Janin, Université de Bordeaux
Richard Lewis, Goldsmiths, University of London
Louis Mandel, Collège de France
Alex McLean, University of Leeds
Carin Meier, Neo Innovation Inc
Rob Myers, Furtherfield
Henrik Nilsson, University of Nottingham (chair)
Dan Piponi, Google Inc
Andrew Sorensen, Queensland University of Technology
Michael Sperber, Active Group GmbH

For further details, see the FARM website:
http://functional-art.org

Walter Bright recounts how he came to write D

The path that led Walter Bright to write a language, now among the top 20 most used, began with curiosity — and an insult.

From this article on Boeing moving applications to the cloud:

The application is about 10-years-old, developed with Visual Basic and the .NET Framework. When rewriting the application for the cloud, Boeing chose Azure because it was already using Microsoft technology.

And people are snarky about companies still using COBOL? Really?!

For more details, see http://cufp.org/2014cfp

Workshop for
Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2014
Sponsored by SIGPLAN
CUFP 2014
Co-located with ICFP 2014
Gothenburg, Sweden
Sep 4-6
Talk Proposal Submission Deadline: 27 June 2014
CUFP 2014 Presentation Submission Form
The annual CUFP workshop is a place where people can see how others are using functional programming to solve real world problems; where practitioners meet and collaborate; where language designers and users can share ideas about the future of their favorite language; and where one can learn practical techniques and approaches for putting functional programming to work.

Giving a CUFP Talk

If you have experience using functional languages in a practical setting, we invite you to submit a proposal to give a talk at the workshop. We're looking for two kinds of talks:

Experience reports are typically 25 minutes long, and aim to inform participants about how functional programming plays out in real-world applications, focusing especially on lessons learned and insights gained. Experience reports don't need to be highly technical; reflections on the commercial, management, or software engineering aspects are, if anything, more important.

Technical talks are also 25 minutes long, and should focus on teaching the audience something about a particular technique or methodology, from the point of view of someone who has seen it play out in practice. These talks could cover anything from techniques for building functional concurrent applications, to managing dynamic reconfigurations, to design recipes for using types effectively in large-scale applications. While these talks will often be based on a particular language, they should be accessible to a broad range of programmers.

We strongly encourage submissions from people in communities that are underrepresented in functional programming, including but not limited to women; people of color; people in gender, sexual and romantic minorities; people with disabilities; people residing in Asia, Africa, or Latin America; and people who have never presented at a conference before. We recognize that inclusion is an important part of our mission to promote functional programming. So that CUFP can be a safe environment in which participants openly exchange ideas, we abide by the SIGPLAN Conference Anti-Harassment Policy.

If you are interested in offering a talk, or nominating someone to do so, please submit your presentation before 27 June 2014 via the

CUFP 2014 Presentation Submission Form

You do not need to submit a paper, just a short proposal for your talk! There will be a short scribe's report of the presentations and discussions but not of the details of individual talks, as the meeting is intended to be more a discussion forum than a technical interchange.

Nevertheless, presentations will be video taped and presenters will be expected to sign an ACM copyright release form.

Note that we will need all presenters to register for the CUFP workshop and travel to Gothenburg at their own expense.

Program Committee

Edward Kmett (McGraw Hill Financial), co-chair
Marius Eriksen (Twitter, Inc.), co-chair
Ozgun Ataman (Soostone, Inc.)
Tim Chevalier (AlephCloud)
Derek Elkins (Now Business Intelligence)
Matthew Might (University of Utah)
Richard Minerich (Bayard Rock)
Audrey Tang (Apple, Inc.)
Jason Zaugg (Typesafe)
More information

For more information on CUFP, including videos of presentations from previous years, take a look at the CUFP website at http://cufp.org. Note that presenters, like other attendees, will need to register for the event. Presentations will be video taped and presenters will be expected to sign an ACM copyright release form. Acceptance and rejection letters will be sent out by July 16th.

Guidance on giving a great CUFP talk

Focus on the interesting bits: Think about what will distinguish your talk, and what will engage the audience, and focus there. There are a number of places to look for those interesting bits.

Setting: FP is pretty well established in some areas, including formal verification, financial processing and server-side web-services. An unusual setting can be a source of interest. If you're deploying FP-based mobile UIs or building servers on oil rigs, then the challenges of that scenario are worth focusing on. Did FP help or hinder in adapting to the setting?

Technology: The CUFP audience is hungry to learn about how FP techniques work in practice. What design patterns have you applied, and to what areas? Did you use functional reactive programming for user interfaces, or DSLs for playing chess, or fault-tolerant actors for large scale geological data processing? Teach us something about the techniques you used, and why we should consider using them ourselves.

Getting things done: How did you deal with large software development in the absence of a myriad of pre-existing support that are often expected in larger commercial environments (IDEs, coverage tools, debuggers, profilers) and without larger, proven bodies of libraries? Did you hit any brick walls that required support from the community?

Don't just be a cheerleader: It's easy to write a rah-rah talk about how well FP worked for you, but CUFP is more interesting when the talks also spend time on what doesn't work. Even when the results were all great, you should spend more time on the challenges along the way than on the parts that went smoothly.

An engineer once articulated himself thusly -

"Commercial software complexity behaves like a gas in that it expands indefinitely, eventually filling up whatever available intellectual capacity is allocated to it." *

In your experience, does this ring true? In your opinion, is such expanding complexity inevitable? And if not, what can be done about it?

* that programmer was me on one of my more fatalistic days :/