Skills Matter is pleased to organise the first annual Functional Programming eXchange. We hope to bring together the leading innovators in the Functional Programming community with the UK's enterprise developer community, for an informal day of deep technical insight, inspiration, innovation and friendly discussion.
The aim of the Functional Programming eXchange is to inspire and promote awareness and adoption of innovative ideas in Functional Programming for enterprise development. Rather than focusing on the specifics of one language, we will focus on the paradigm and ideas of Functional Programming that apply across the various languages and what these can bring to modern enterprise development today.
With 6 expert talks and two Parkbench sessions, this intensive
one day, one track event is structured to encourage discussion and bring together the leading thinkers and passionate members of the Functional Programming community. With a maximum number of 125 delegates, we aim to provide an informal and intimate environment where you can learn, ask questions, share experience, demonstrate new ideas and techniques, talk to the experts and have some fun too.
Robert Pickering has kindly agreed to be the Programme Lead, and is currently working with Duncan Coutts, Ganesh Sittampalam, Anton Schwaighofer, Sadek Drobi, Miles Sabin, Matthew Sackman on an interesting and exciting set of talks!
Register today
To event aims to provide a real opportunity to share ideas, learn and discuss, so we have limited the number of delegates to 125 only - and we expect tickets to go fast, so if you like to join us at this event, then
register today!
PROGRAMME
Monday 7th December 2009
Track 1
09:30-10:00 WELCOME MESSAGE
Welcome message
10:00-11:00 COMPUTATION ABSTRACTION
Sadek Drobi: For a long time, and due to the lack of main FP concepts in most mainstream languages, we have missed opportunities for abstraction, code expressiveness and conciseness. With today's democratization of FP, Computational Abstraction is what will enable us to be less dependent on what specific programming language syntax may offer, creating libraries of control structures and composition forms that help find concise and expressive solutions for enterprise programming challenges
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11:05-11:50 SUPERCHARGED RABBIT: RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AT HIGH SPEED IN ERLANG
Matthew Sackman: RabbitMQ has been written in Erlang since its conception, in summer 2006. Since then the Rabbits have been getting more reliable, more scalable and faster. Recently we have embarked on a large modification of Rabbit to address resource management issues and increase scalability. This talk will extol the virtues and otherwise of functional programming and writing in Erlang, along with the challenges we are addressing and how we're overcoming them.
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11:55-12:40 F# AND UNITS-OF-MEASURE FOR TECHNICAL COMPUTING
Anton Schwaighofer: This talk is about F# and Units-of-measure for Technical Computing. F# (shipped in Visual Studio 2010) is a functional programming language that supports static checking and type inference for units-of-measure. Even in the simplest applications, units-of-measure can act as a valuable additional check for the correctness of the code.
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12:40-13:40 LUNCH & REFRESHMENTS
Lunch & Refreshments
13:45-14:30 PARKBENCH PANEL DISCUSSION
: Just after lunch, we'll hold the first ParkBench Panel discussion, led by Robert Pickering, to discuss ideas, stuff we learned during the morning and things we would like to hear more about. Delegates will not only be able to ask their questions to the speakers of the expert talks, but are also actively encouraged to join the panel to express their opinion or share their experience!
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14:30-15:15 FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING FOR QUANTITATIVE MODELLING AT CREDIT SUISSE
Ganesh Sittampalam: Credit Suisse's Global Modelling and Analytics Group (GMAG) has been using functional programming in a number of guises for several years, starting with an in-house language built around Excel, then domain-specific languages and other code generation tools with Haskell and most recently using F# for the delivery of models and other software directly into production environments. This talk will discuss why Credit Suisse has adopted functional programming and the challenges and benefits that it has brought.
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16:10-16:55 STRONG TYPES AND PURE FUNCTIONS
Duncan Coutts: This talk is about the software engineering benefits we can obtain by controlling side effects. By starting with pure functions and using types to mark actions with side effects we can build custom computational environments and have strong guarantees about what side effects are permitted and are not permitted. We will look at where these guarantees can help us, particularly in enforcing interface contracts.
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17:00-17:45 USING COMBINATORS TO TACKLE THE HTML RENDERING PROBLEM
Robert Pickering: Rendering HTML that is dynamic and looks good the many browsers people use today is a tricky problem. In this presentation we’ll dig into one part of the WebSharper platform, a new product from IntelliFactory, that aims to tackle this problem by using a DSL/combinator approach.
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