Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP)
4 September 2009
Co-located with ICFP 2009

Functional Programming As a Means, Not an End

The CUFP 2009 Scribe Report is now available.
Thanks to Don Stewart for making this thoughtful record.

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Visit the CUFP web site

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 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 successfully used in commercial, industrial, open-source, and government settings, where their advantages have been leveraged dramatically.

CUFP 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 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.

There will be no published proceedings, as the meeting is intended to be more a discussion forum than a technical interchange.

Attendees can combine CUFP with the ACM-SIGPLAN Developer Tracks on Functional Programming (DEFUN 2009), hosted on 3 and 5 September, to form a contiguous three day event. The combination of DEFUN and CUFP will cover practical application of functional programming tools and techniques together with the social and business issues that arise in adopting them.

Program Committee

  • Francesco Cesarini, Erlang Training and Consulting, UK (francesco(at)erlang-consulting(dot)com) (Co-Chair)
  • Manuel Chakravarty, The University of New South Wales, Australia (chak(at)cse(dot)unsw(dot)edu(dot)au)
  • Kathleen Fisher, AT&T, USA (kfisher(at)research(dot)att(dot)com)
  • Jim Grundy, Intel, USA (jim(dot)d(dot)grundy(at)intel(dot)com) (Co-Chair)
  • John Hughes, QuviQ, Sweden (john(dot)hughes(at)quviq(dot)com)
  • Nick Levine, Ravenbrook, UK (ndl(at)ravenbrook(dot)com)
  • Anil Madhavapeddy, UK (anil(at)recoil(dot)org)
  • Laura McKinney, Galois, USA (laura(at)galois(dot)com)
  • Yaron Minsky, Jane Street Capital, USA (yminsky(at)janestcapital(dot)com)
  • David Pollak (feeder(dot)of(dot)the(dot)bears(at)gmail(dot)com)
  • Ganesh Sittampalam, Credit Suisse, UK (ganesh(dot)sittampalam(at)credit-suisse(dot)com)
  • Ulf Wiger, Ericsson, Sweden (ulf(dot)wiger(at)ericsson(dot)com)

10 April 2009