This year CUFP is putting on a series of longer tutorials to introduce functional programming languages in depth, and in particular the organisers are delighted to announce a TWO DAY Haskell tutorial, taught by leading experts and educators Jeremy Gibbons (Oxford) and Simon Marlow (Microsoft Research). This two-day tutorial is designed to introduce you to Haskell without assuming that you know anything about the language in advance, and will introduce you to the underlying ideas and concepts of Haskell as well as giving you hands-on experience of programming in Haskell. So, if you're interested we do hope that you are able to attend, or if not, that you'll pass this information on to colleagues and friends who might be interested. There's more information and registration instructions at http://cufp.org/conference/2012 Hoping to see you there! Duncan Coutts, Simon Thompson, Michael Sperber CUFP tutorials organisers More information … Abstract Pure functional programming is about programming with expressions rather than actions, data rather than control. Many programs are more naturally expressed in this way, and functional programs are often an order of magnitude shorter than equivalent imperative programs - just as programs in traditional high-level languages like C and Java are typically much shorter and clearer than their equivalents in assembly language. Many exciting ideas in mainstream programming arose first in FP, including garbage collection, generics, closures, and list comprehensions. FP is a fertile laboratory for language innovation, and familiarity with FP is good preparation for future developments in programming. In particular, multicore chips and cloud computing architectures are forcing us all into dealing with concurrency, and there is good evidence that the breakthroughs here will come from FP, with its emphasis on immutability and independence of evaluation order. Content This two-day tutorial introduces the essentials of Haskell, a pure lazy functional language with a mature compiler, a wealth of libraries, and an active community. We will focus particularly on concurrent programming - handling multiple interactions at the same time - which is increasingly important in a wide range of applications today, from GUI programming to server-side web development. There will be a balance between lectures and exercises, so that you will be exposed to both the theory and the practice of FP. Day 1 will focus on the basics of FP with Haskell, introducing the concepts necessary to get you writing simple programs, including an introduction to monads. On Day 2 you will get a little taste of the joys of concurrent programming in Haskell. By the end, you will be writing some simple (but real!) Concurrent Haskell programs. We will also cover some of the practical aspects of day-to-day programming in Haskell, such as working with third-party libraries. Simon Thompson | Professor of Logic and Computation School of Computing | University of Kent | Canterbury, CT2 7NF, UK s.j.thompson@kent.ac.uk | M +44 7986 085754 | W www.cs.kent.ac.uk/~sjt