Following on from the “Birth of the Industrial Haskell Group” talk at CUFP in Edinburgh, we will be having a short meeting to discuss our future plans before everyone heads off to dinner. That’s on the 4th September, initially gathering in a suitable corner of the CUFP location.
If you’re thinking of joining the IHG, or even just interested in what is going on, then please join us.
The Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) workshop is in Edinburgh this year, on the 4th September, along with the developer tracks on the 3rd and 5th. Both Duncan and I will be there, as well as at ICFP and the other co-located events. If you’ll be there then and would like to talk to us, either about Well-Typed or about the Industrial Haskell Group (IHG), then drop us an e-mail or just find us during the week.
In the mean time, if you’d like to give a 25 minute talk about your experiences with functional programming at CUFP, then you have just two weeks to submit a proposal. These talks are a great way for everyone to benefit from each others’ experiences. The call says:
Talks are typically 25 minutes long, but can be shorter. They aim to inform participants about how functional programming played out in real-world applications, focusing especially on the re-usable lessons learned, or insights gained. Your talk does not need to be highly technical; for this audience, reflections on the commercial, management, or software engineering aspects are, if anything, more important. You do not need to submit a paper! Talks on the practical application of functional programming with a primarily technical focus may also be appropriate for the adjacent DEFUN 2009 event.
If you are interested in offering a talk, or nominating someone to do so, send an e-mail to francesco(at)erlang-consulting(dot)com or jim(dot)d(dot)grundy(at)intel(dot)com by 15 May 2009 with a short description of what you’d like to talk about or what you think your nominee should give a talk about. Such descriptions should be about one page long.
We are pleased to announce the creation of the Industrial Haskell Group (IHG). The IHG is an organisation to support the needs of commercial users of the Haskell programming language.
For more information, please see
http://industry.haskell.org/
Currently, the main activity of the IHG is a collaborative development scheme, in which multiple companies fund work on the Haskell development platform to their mutual benefit. The scheme has started with three partners of the IHG, including Galois and Amgen.
More details are available at
http://industry.haskell.org/collab
If your company is interested in joining then please e-mail info@industry.haskell.org
After months of work, GHC 6.10.1 is finally released!
The headlines include a parallel garbage collector, extensible exceptions, haddock 2, Data Parallel Haskell as an extralib, and much more besides.
Well-Typed is pleased to have been able to play its part in making this release happen, with Ian working with the Simons at GHC HQ and many other developers across the world to bring this release together.
Meanwhile, Duncan visitied Galois to team up with Don Stewart for some extensive pre-release testing. Their experiments with building all of the packages on Hackage give us confidence that this will be a solid release.
Thanks to everyone who played a part, be it development, testing or otherwise, in this release. We couldn’t have done it without your help!
ICFP is great fun as usual. There have been some good talks and there’s a packed schedule for the next few days. Of course the most important business takes place during the coffee breaks and in the pubs in the evenings.
One thing that feels pretty new and exciting this year is the number of Haskell hackers going professional and independent. Apart from Well-Typed of course there’s also the Tupil guys doing web development and Conal Elliott has himself up as a consultant doing functional graphics.
Thursday will be the Haskell Symposium. Don Stewart and I will be giving a short about the Haskell Platform. You can see the two page summary paper and I promise I’ll post the slides. I hope it will be videoed (guerrilla style so it will not just disappear into the black hole that is the ACM digital library).
Don and I will also be chairing the “Future of Haskell” discussion on Thursday afternoon. There are some interesting things to talk about, we’ll probably hear about progress on goals from last year, in particular SMP and Haskell-prime. Then we’ll open discussion to the floor to talk about key goals for next year. So I’m looking forward to that.
It’s been many months in the planning but we finally announced our new Haskell consultancy company - Well-Typed LLP.
We received many messages of support and advice. We’re most grateful for all this goodwill from the community.
There’s now one more argument you can make when selling Haskell in your organisation - there’s now a company dedicated to supporting your language of choice.
The next six months are going to be pretty exciting.