A brief Haskell-at-OSCON trip report
August 3rd, 2007 by Bryan O'Sullivan
At OSCON last week, Simon Peyton Jones delivered some superlative sessions. Two of these are now available for your video enjoyment.
- His keynote talk, “Transactional memory for concurrent programming”, is about 15 minutes long, and was very well received.
- The tutorial, “A taste of Haskell”, is about three hours long, and the video is split into part one and part two.
- Simon’s third talk, “Nested data parallelism”, was essentially an overview for a more general audience of a talk he gave a few months ago to the London Haskell User’s Group. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t recorded, but here’s a link to the footage of Simon’s London talk.
I highly recommend watching the keynote video at the very least. Simon is an excellent and enthusiastic speaker.
There was a lot of buzz in the “hallway track” and blogosphere (Technorati currently counts almost 60 blog postings) after Simon’s sessions. John Goerzen and I went for coffee with Simon on Wednesday morning, and he was accosted by several enthusiastic attendees as we tried to make good our escape. Quite amusing.
We puzzled with Simon over the mystery of this recent buzz around functional programming languages. The best stab I could make at a guess was that languages like Python and Ruby have introduced a generation of programmers to the idea that their code can be expressive and concise. News is percolating out that Haskell offers comparable or better facilities for abstraction and brevity, but with the additional benefits of safety, native code performance, and multicore scalability.
Later that day, we had the opportunity to meet with several old and new friends who work for a notable Portland-area Haskell company (yes, such companies exist!), Galois Connections, and with another Portland hacker, William Lee Irwin.
Thanks for posting this — and the Technorati link.
One thing I would add is the link to Simon’s slides from A Taste of Haskell. The video doesn’t show the slides very often; I’d suggest opening them up in side-by-side windows and following along.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/presentations/os2007/os_peytonjones.pdf
These videos and slides are very useful educational resources for haskell neophytes like myself. Simon is a really great advocate for haskell. I get drained giving one 20-minute talk at a conference, so I have no idea how he can go on for hours. I guess the only answer is he really loves haskell (and FP).
[...] Real World Haskell » Blog Archive » A brief Haskell-at-OSCON trip report (tags: haskell programming) [...]
[...] videos of Simon Peyton Jones’s talks at OSCON have garnered quite a bit of attention since O’Reilly published them. To give an [...]
Tjanks for posting. The slides for the keynote talk you can find on Simon’s homepage. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/STM-OSCON.pdf
[...] been garnering a fair bit of attention of late, largely as a result of Simon Peyton-Jones‘ presence at OSCON (and the ensuing flurry of Reddit postings of related blog posts). He gave a keynote on Software [...]
On why FP-now there has always been an FP undercurrent to the software industry. At a guess it has been some of the high profile wins with Haskell lately (Darcs, Pugs, publicized programming contest wins mentioned on Slashdot) that have generated a buzz. And once you hear, ‘and you can work with infinite lists’, most folks are at least going to look in.
Why I cannot get the video files? Are they missing?