2016 Call for Presentations

Workshop for
Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2016
Sponsored by SIGPLAN
CUFP 2016
Co-located with ICFP 2016
Nara, Japan
September 22-24
Talk Proposal Submission Deadline: 24 June 2016
CUFP 2016 Presentation Submission Form

The annual CUFP event 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 event. We're looking for two kinds of talks:

Retrospective talks are typically 25 minutes long. Now that CUFP has run for more than a decade, we intend to invite past speakers to share what they’ve learned after a decade spent as commercial users of functional programming. We will favour experience reports that include technical content.

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 Code of Conduct Policy.

If you are interested in offering a talk, or nominating someone to do so, please submit your presentation before 24 June 2016 via the

CUFP 2016 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 of a discussion forum than a technical interchange.

Nevertheless, presentations will be recorded 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 Japan at their own expense. There are some funds available to would-be presenters who require assistance in this respect.

Program Committee

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. Acceptance and rejection letters will be sent out by July 15th.

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-scale software development in the absence of pre-existing support tools 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 cover 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.