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

Experience reports are typically 25 minutes long, and aim to inform participants about how functional programming plays out in real-world applications, focusing especially on lessons learned and insights gained. Experience reports don't need to be highly technical; reflections on the commercial, management, or software engineering aspects are, if anything, more important.

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 Anti-Harassment Policy.

If you are interested in offering a talk, or nominating someone to do
so, please submit your presentation before 27 June 2014 via the

CUFP 2014 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 a discussion forum than a technical interchange.

Nevertheless, presentations will be video taped 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 Gothenburg at their own expense.

Program Committee

• Edward Kmett (McGraw Hill Financial), co-chair
• Marius Eriksen (Twitter, Inc.), co-chair
• Ozgun Ataman (Soostone, Inc.)
• Tim Chevalier (AlephCloud)
• Derek Elkins (Now Business Intelligence)
• Matthew Might (University of Utah)
• Richard Minerich (Bayard Rock)
• Audrey Tang (Apple, Inc.)
• Jason Zaugg (Typesafe)

More information

For more information on CUFP, including videos of presentations from
previous years, take a look at the CUFP website at cufp.org. Note that presenters, like other attendees, will need to register for the event. Presentations will be video taped and presenters will be expected to sign an ACM copyright release form. Acceptance and rejection letters will be sent out by July 16th.

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-sid 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 software development in the absence of a myriad of pre-existing support 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 spend time on 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.

In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position.

• 0. Semantics
• 1. Syntax
• 2. Lexical syntax
• 3. Lexical syntax of comments
• 4. Semantics of records

I base the Weak Record Conjecture on the stable of proposed record semantics, which now includes (among others) Simple Overloaded Record Fields (SORF), Agda-derived Records (ADR), Frege-derived Records (FDR), Type-Punning Declared Overloaded Record Fields (TPDORF), Syntax Directed Name Resolution, Type Indexed Records and the less seriously proposed Homotopy Extensional Record Proposal (HERP) and Dependent Extensional Record Proposal (DERP).

There is an additional option implied but not stated in all of this, which is the option to "Leave Well Enough Alone" (LWEA?), since you can always Man Up and Learn Lenses (MUALL). Given that every record proposal I've seen thus far breaks polymorphic field updates to some degree, and lenses are going to be compatible with whatever mess folks settle on, even preserving the status quo, this is the path I've chosen to take.

Now, based on the fact that discussions of syntax have already started, and the intuition supplied by the ordering already present in Wadler's insightful law, I would also like to conjecture that perhaps an even stronger version of Wadler's law might be able to be stated, the "Strong Record Conjecture".

In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position.

• 0. Semantics
• 1. Syntax
• 2. Lexical syntax
• 3. Lexical syntax of comments
• 4. Semantics of records
• 5. Syntax of records
• 6. Lexical syntax of records

Under the Strong Record Conjecture, even in the unlikely event that universal accord could be reached on record semantics today — 164 days into this discussion — we'd still be due for at least another 3 years (328 + 656 days) of backlogged complaining over the syntax before anything gets done.

The evidence thus far is pretty strong that at least the Weak Record Conjecture holds — if anything the exponent is too small and may require further calibration, but we don't have much data yet on the Strong Record Conjecture. Consequently, and in the name of science, I plan to check in again on the record debate in 3 years. Hopefully by then we will have resolved the remaining semantic issues, and will have a better feel for the necessary time commitment required to resolve items 5 and 6.

By way of example, you might try to view some Haskell source code.

This also might provide better context when I start to talk about things like continuations because I can link right inline to more extended static content.

This also provides me with a more convenient venue for static content than WordPress' default page management system.

Please, let me know if some bit of markup doesn't show up right.

Syntax highlighting works.

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Commutative diagrams, check.

All systems go.

World, meet blog; blog, meet world.