Message from the Chairs


The goal of the Commercial Users of Functional Programming series of workshops is to build a community for users of functional programming languages and technology. The fourth workshop in the series took place in Freiburg, Germany on 4th October 2007, co-located with the International Conference on Functional Programming. The workshop is growing rapidly, having started in Snowbird in 2004 with 25 participants, increasing to 40 in Tallinn in 2005 and 57 in Portland in 2006, and finally to 104 registered in 2007. We take this growth as evidence of a sea change in attitudes to functional programming: from being an academic pursuit, functional programming is rapidly becoming a sought-after technology with increasingly broad applications.

For the first time, this year's workshop received more offers of presentations than would fit in the available time. The eventual schedule included an invited talk by Xavier Leroy, eleven contributed presentations, and an energetic concluding discussion led by Don Syme. Many of the slides for these presentations are available from the CUFP home page (http://cufp.functionalprogramming.com).

CUFP has traditionally had a scribe, who takes notes on the presentations and then writes a summary of the event. This year, Jeremy Gibbons took on that role, and we are very grateful to his diligence in both taking detailed notes and in writing a comprehensive and enlightening summary. His report is also available from the CUFP home page.

This year, we also made a video recording of the presentations. We would like to thank Peter Thiemann and his students for providing the equipment, doing the recording, and post processing the raw footage. In the end, nine of the presenters opted to have their talks included in the on-line collection.

The slides, videos, and written summary are all now available in the ACM Digital Library, the first time this has been done for CUFP.

The next CUFP workshop will take place in Victoria, British Columbia, again co-located with ICFP, in September 2008. We hope to see you there!

Kathleen Fisher
Simon Peyton Jones
Co-Program Chairs