Call for participation: Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop

[Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>]

           IMPORTANT NOTE: Registration is now available at:
                 http://www.cs.ioc.ee/tfp-icfp-gpce05


                            CUFP 2005
                      THE SECOND ACM SIGPLAN
         COMMERCIAL USERS OF FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING WORKSHOP
                     http://www.galois.com/cufp/

                          Talinn, Estonia
                        September 24th 2005
                        Co-located with ICFP
                  http://www.brics.dk/~danvy/icfp05/

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Important dates

Early registration deadline  July 29, 2005
Late registration deadline   September 2, 2005
Workshop                     September 24, 2005

Registration is now available at:

http://www.cs.ioc.ee/tfp-icfp-gpce05

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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/.

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Schedule

The meeting will last a full day, with a mix of invited presentations
and discussion sessions.

This year, we have the following confirmed speakers:

    * Atrijus Tang; talking about PUGS, a Perl6 implementation, written
      in Haskell;

    * Fabrice Le Fessant; talking about MLDonkey, a popular
      multi-platform, multi-network P2P client written in OCaml.

    * Michael Sperber; talking about uses of Scheme in the banking
      industry.

    * David Roundy; talking about darcs, a popular and flexible
      revision control system well-suited to highly distributed
      development, written in Haskell.

    * Jim Grundy; talking his experiences with functional programming
      at Intel's Strategic CAD Labs.

    * Robert Boone; talking about his experiences at FreeScale.

    * Jonathan Soebel; talking about lessons the FP community can learn
      from the OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and its related
      marketing efforts.

We will also be having two working sessions, where lively debate and
brainstorming will be the order of the day:

    * FP, Education, and Industry: industry folks complain that there
aren't enough FP folks being produced by schools, and educators
complain that students don't see any point in studying FP if there are
no jobs to be had. How can we break this stalemate? Simon Thompson of
Functional and Declarative Programming in Education (FDPE05) will be
joining us, and we'll be debriefing at FDPE05.

    * Stimulating a CUFP Community: we'd like the buzz and excitement
surrounding CUFP to persist beyond the workshops. What would such a
community look like? How do we make it happen? The session will kick
off with two separate but complimentary starting points: a proposed
"Users of FP" community web site and a proposed "Haskell Consortium"
web site.

There will be no published proceedings, as the meeting is intended to
be more a discussion forum than a technical interchange. A full report
of last year's workshop appeared in the Functional Programming column
of the December 2004 issue of SIGPLAN Notices, and we plan to do the
same this year.