2006 Commercial Users of Functional Programming
(CUFP)
September 21, 2006
Co-located with ICFP

Functional Programming As a Means, Not an End


   The workshop was held on September 21, 2006.

   57 people attended, by far the largest attendance yet.

   All of the talks were well-received, and the discussions were lively and productive.

   Slides available

   Report available


The goal of CUFP is to build a community for users of functional programming languages and technology, be they using functional languages in their professional lives, in an open source project (other than implementation of functional languages), as a hobby, or any combination thereof.

In short: anyone who uses functional programming as a means, but not an end.

Functional languages have been under academic development for over 25 years, and are still proving to be very fertile ground for programming language research. Consequently, most of the development focus of these languages is driven by academic and theoretical questions. More recently, however, functional languages have been very successfully used in commercial, industrial, open-source, and government settings, where their advantages have been able to be leveraged dramatically.

It aims to help functional programming become increasingly viable as a technology for use in the commercial, industrial, and government space, by providing a forum for FP professionals to share their experiences and ideas, whether business, management, or engineering. It also aims to enable the formation and cementing of relationships and alliances that further the commercial use of functional languages. Providing user feedback to language designers and implementers is not a primary goal of the workshop, though it will be welcome if it occurs.

This was the third CUFP; see CUFP 2004 and CUFP 2005 for information about the earlier meetings.

Schedule

The meeting lasted a full day, with a mix of invited presentations and two discussion sessions. Slides, if available, are linked to below.

8:30 Haskell and the Linspire Toolchain. Clifford Beshers, Linspire Inc. abstract, slides (pdf), slides (ppt)
9:00 Building a Startup with Standard ML. Steve Sims, Reactive Systems, Inc. abstract, slides (pdf)
9:30 Scheme in Space. Richard Cleis, Air Force Research Lab. abstract
10:00 B R E A K
10:30 Caml Trader: Adventures of a Functional Programmer on Wall Street. Yaron Minsky, Jane Street Capital. abstract, slides (pdf)
11:00 Why Functional Programming Matters to Credit Suisse. Howard Mansell, Credit Suisse First Boston. abstract slides (pdf)
11:30 Group Discussion: Mixed Mode Approaches and/or Finding Employees.
12:00 L U N C H
2:00 Analysis of Microprocessor Components with a Functional Language-based Formal Verification Toolbox. Roope Kaivola, Intel Corporation. abstract, slides (ppt)
2:30 Bringing Declarative Programming into a Commercial Tool for Developing Integrated Circuits. Rishiyur Nikhil, Bluespec, Inc. abstract slides (pdf)
3:00 Group Discussion: Adoption of New Technology: Making the Case.
3:30 B R E A K
4:00 Artifically Intelligent Haskell. J. Garret Morris, Aetion Inc. slides (pdf)
4:30 Betting on Functional Programming and Winning. Erik Stenman, Kreditor. abstract
5:00 Wrap-Up.

There will be no published proceedings, as the meeting is intended to be more a discussion forum than a technical interchange. Reports of the two previous workshops have appeared in the Functional Programming column of the December 2004 issue of SIGPLAN Notices, and we plan to do the same again this year. The CUFP 2004 report is available for download; last year, Simon Thompson kindly wrote up some notes about his impressions.

Committee

John Hughes. rjmh at cs.chalmers.se
Matthias Felleisen. matthias at ccs.neu.edu
Stephen Weeks. sweeks at sweeks.com
Ulf Wiger. ulf.wiger at ericsson.com
Mike Ashley. mashley at beckman.com
Jim Grundy. Jim_Grundy at ichips.intel.com
Andy Adams-Moran. adams-moran at galois.com (Co-Chair)
Kathleen Fisher. kfisher at research.att.com (Chair)