Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2013: Second CFP

[Marius Eriksen]

I am helping organize the Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) workshop this year. The workshop is under the aegis of ICFP, held in Boston this year Sep 22-24, and comprises talks and tutorials. We've finalized an excellent tutorials schedule[1]; The CFP for talks follows. As well, I've written a short essay[2] about CUFP this year, which I encourage you to read.

You can follow us on Twitter at @cufpconference.

[1] http://cufp.org/conference/schedule

[2] http://monkey.org/~marius/cufp.html

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Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) 2013

ICFP 2013; Boston, MA, Sep 22-24.

Proposals due June 29.

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 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 are looking for both experience reports and in-depth technical talks.

Experience reports are typically 25 minutes long (but negotiable), 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 (also negotiable), 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.

If you are interested in offering a talk, or nominating someone to do so, please fill in the form at

    https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/cufp

There will be a short scribes 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. You do not need to submit a paper, just a proposal for your talk! Note that we will need all presenters to register for the CUFP workshop and travel to Boston at their own expense.

Program committee

    Marius Eriksen (Twitter, Inc.), co-chair

    Mike Sperber (Active Group), co-chair

    Mary Sheeran (Chalmers)

    Andres Löh (Well-Typed)

    Thomas Gazagnaire (OCamlPro)

    Steve Vinoski (Basho)

    Jorge Ortiz (Foursquare, Inc.)

    Blake Matheny (Tumblr, Inc.)

    Simon Marlow (Facebook, Inc.)

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. 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.

Please contact Marius Eriksen or Mike Sperber for questions or concerns:

    marius(at)twitter(dot)com

    sperber(at)deinprogramm(dot)de

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 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.

Important dates

Submissions due: June 29, 2013

Acceptance notifications: Mid-late July, 2013

Workshop: September 22-24, 2013