Why you should go to ICFP 2012

Functional programming has been gaining popularity pretty rapidly recently. We’ve got serious projects from big Internet shops (Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook), to varied domains such as radio, knowledge bases, the energy grid, cryptography, NoSQL databases and storage, intricate PS3 games, and even making safer cars. Throughout all of this, one conference has been around since the very beginning: the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming. The early days consisted of academics (some with fine beards and sandals) developing the tools and theories behind FP, and spawned the famous ICFP Programming Contest. The modern ICFP, however, also caters to the practical industry practitioner at all levels of knowledge, and this blog post is meant to introduce you to what to expect this year.

ICFP 2012 is a week-long conference on September 9-15th, held in beautiful Copenhagen. The theory-oriented workshops are held just before the main event on Sunday, on topics such as cross-model, generic and higher-order programming. The main conference lasts three days, with a combination of academic papers and experience reports that are formally published by the ACM (see my experience report or a Xenstored full paper for two Xen-related publications).

The main conference finishes mid-week, and the focus switches to more informal, interactive workshops that are relevant to the FP practitioner. The registration system lets you buy a day pass and attend any combination, so here’s a list that I’ve come up, along with “who” it is intended for. Needless to say, these are my personal views (although I’m co-chairing CUFP and the OCaml Workshop, and any mistakes there would be bad!).

Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP)

CUFP has been going since 2004, acting as a voice for commercial users of functional programming languages and technology. CUFP is the biggest workshop at ICFP and spread over the last three days of the conference week.

• Never done any Functional Programming before: For the first time, CUFP offers day-long tutorials for complete beginners to functional programming. You can spend a full day learning the basics of Scala or two days on Haskell (including concurrency and multicore). These tutorials are separate events with their own registrations so you can attend just them if you wish, and still meet the other attendees during the regular breaks and evening events.

• Done some FP, and want to improve or learn a new language: There are half-day tutorials that are more focussed on specific topics: real-world OCaml (by me and Yaron!), Clojure and F#, and popular web frameworks in Erlang and Haskell.

• There’s safety in crowds: The final day of CUFP (on Saturday 15th) is a full day of experience reports from industry speakers who have applied FP techniques to their day-to-day work. These talks are not intended to be deeply technical, but instead reflect on the social and engineering challenges around integrating a new (and often risky) technology into an existing business. The sessions this year are diverse, with talks from Citrix on client-side cloud computing, on building NoSQL databases, and a number of talks on biotech (bigdata, visualisation and medical software), developing real-time and offline analytics for national power grids, and even using FP to write software that runs directly on FPGAs (including directly on a new 10GBs switch from Arista networks). We really try to make this talk session a balanced view of the upsides and downsides of using FP, and encourage speakers to relate what went wrong as well as right in their experiences.

• CTO/executive, aka “schmoozing”: A huge part of CUFP is the great networking between engineers and academics (with job-hunting grad students thrown into the mix). There are regular breaks which are full of animated conversations, and we are planning an industrial reception where vendors can show off their wares (either on Thursday or Friday) where you find commercial support, or recruit bright graduate students from top schools across the world. The breaks are also a chance to corner your favourite language hacker-professor and make them aware of your particular needs!

I’m co-chairing CUFP this year along with Michael Sperber, so feel free to direct any questions you have about it to us, and see below for registration information.

Language Workshops

Some of the bigger communities have day-long workshops which are a combination of short presentations and regular breaks for discussions. If you are using (or just considering the use of) these languages, then these are a good way to meet all the right people who could help you with your efforts.

OCaml and ML

I’m co-chairing the first OCaml Users and Developers workshop on Friday (Sep 14th). This event has traditionally been run in Paris in past years, but we decided it was getting big enought to run alongside ICFP. The talk schedule is a mix of experience reports and pratical new toolchain developments. There will be talks on all the latest development tools (memory profiling, concurrent programming), standard library efforts (Core, OPAM packaging), as well as experience reports (the Arakoon k/v store, Xen Cloud, and building 3D WebGL engines for NASA, among others). The hot topic at this workshop is the emerging consensus on building a more integrated OCaml Platform that acts as a stable base for larger applications, and the state-of-the-world talks from Xavier Leroy, Yaron Minsky and Fabrice le Fessant will no doubt kick off heated discussions that will go on late into dinner (last year, we all ended up in a very fine Tokyo restaurant drinking sake and arguing about GADTs and the global financial crisis).

OCaml is the most widely used variant of the ML family, and the ML workshop on the day before (Sep 13) takes a broader view on the theory and implementations of ML. Talks here include the Coq theorem prover, efficient implementations of OCaml running on the JVM, multicore-ML, and experimental extensions to ML-style programming (effect tracking, model checking, applicative functors, and GADTs).

Both of these workshops are convenient to attend over a two-day period (Thu and Fri), and will give you a huge amount of information about the latest developments in the land of ML.

Haskell

The Haskell community has been growing rather fast over the last few years, and so there are two separate days of talks.

The Haskell Symposium has formal published proceedings, and consists of a diverse array of research work that has direct implications on the future of Haskell. My personal highlights include the parallel array fusion and vectorisation for data processing on modern hardware, the intriguing “Wormhole” effect-tracking FRP, and Safe Haskell for practical information-flow tracking.

The second day has the Haskell Implementors Workshop, which is a more informal affair aimed at the day-to-day infrastructure and toolchain needs of Haskell. The schedule includes overview talks from the two Simons, and ongoing work on distributed programming and Javascript compilation.

So if you are after a broad overview of Haskell then attend the Symposium, and if you wish to join the Haskell Hogwarts and start compiler hacking, then the implementors workshop will have all the right people to help you out.

Erlang

The Erlang workshop at ICFP has been running for eleven years now, and tends to be a combination of big projects and work-in-progress reports. This year has the latest on porting Erlang to use LLVM for high-performance computing, as well as experience reports on scalability testing and the widely-used Riak distributed database. Despite my prelediction towards static typing, Erlang is a language that I keep intending to make bigger use of, so I plan to drop into this session for sure.

Last year we had to learn Japanese, the hardest functional language

We also made a lot of new local friends

Luckily, the weather made us feel at home though

Registration

This has been a whirlwind tour of the ICFP week (or rather, me writing this down while planning my own schedule). The early registration deadline is next week (Aug 9th), and the online registration has all the details of the full schedule and day prices. There is also local information about where to stay and visit in Copenhagen, if you want to take a late-summer break while making the trip.

Something worth noting is that all of this is run under the auspices of the ACM by volunteers, which accounts for the somewhat chaotic spread of information across all the websites. We’ve tried to demystify the CUFP process here, but please get in touch with any of the organisers if you are confused and want some help. We always welcome volunteer offers too, and the first round of drinks is on me for anyone who helps out during the week!