OSCon Wednesday Part 2
July 25th, 2007
After today’s keynote session, I met up with Simon Peyton-Jones and Bryan O’Sullivan. A vibrant discussion with these two Haskellers. We had all noticed that Haskell, and FP languages in general, have been doing really well lately and mused about why. Perhaps it’s that people are becoming more used to functional approaches to problem solving because popular languages include some of them these days. Or perhaps it’s that FP already has tools to solve problems that are suddenly hot, such as parallelization.
In any case, Simon’s Haskell talks have really been highlights this week for many.
I had some time to visit the show floor. Stopped by the Debian booth and met Steve Langasek. A couple of Sun guys dropped by to talk about trademarks with OpenJDK. Bart Massey of Portland State Univ. also dropped by. I’ve conversed with him in email a few times. We talked about what PSU is doing with Haskell, some of the code I’ve written, and some of the code they’ve written. They’re doing some fun stuff with rocketry and software-defined radio.
Oh, attended Simon’s talk on nested data parallelism, which he is working to add to GHC. That sounds like a very interesting topic. Think list comprehensions, but the compiler automatically parallelizes the task for you.
After the conference’s events, went out to dinner with some local (and some conference) Haskellers. That was a lot of fun, and Terah and Jacob got to come along too. People are doing some interesting stuff with Haskell.
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