Dear all, We are very glad to announce an exciting program for the 7th meeting of the Ghent Functional Programming Group, especially since we are celebrating our first year of existence today. Our program features no less than three interesting functional programming languages: Erlang, Haskell and Scheme. The meeting will take place on Tuesday, April 26 in the Technicum building of Ghent University (Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Gent) at 19h30. As before, to enter the building, you should go to the automatic sliding door on the far left of the building and dial the phone number that is provided on the note taped to the door. Someone will then open the door for you. Our program is as follows: 1. Tom Van Custem - Experiments with MapReduce in Erlang MapReduce is a programming model for large data processing popularized by, and in daily use at Google. The MapReduce model builds strongly on key tenets of functional programming such as higher-order functions and side-effect free execution. In this talk, we summarize this programming model and describe a didactic implementation in Erlang. Invented at Ericsson's research labs, Erlang is known for its massively concurrent programming model, and itself builds on a functional core language. The talk will not focus on Erlang as such, but we will describe its key features as needed to understand the MapReduce abstraction. 2. Tom Schrijvers - How you could have won the VPW 2011 contest with Haskell We all know that Functional Programming is great for writing concise solutions for programming problems. With some skill this can even be done quickly! Yet, there was little evidence of this at the 3rd edition of the Flemish Programming Contest (VPW 2011) that took place on March 23. Not so before the contest: The jury stress-tested all questions by writing various solutions in different languages. Haskell was used to solve most problems and invariably produced short solutions. In this talk I present my own Haskell solutions to several of this year's problems and discuss alternative solution strategies with the audience. After the talk you will be all set for winning next year's edition -- or at least enjoying it -- using Haskell. 3. Pieter Audenaert - Functional Geometry and a Graphical Language We will discuss a simple language for drawing images. During the presentation we will illustrate the power of data abstraction and algebraic closure, meanwhile using higher order procedures in an essential manner. The language has been designed to easy experimenting with patterns such as those appearing in typical M.C. Escher drawings where the artist repeats the pattern both moving it across the drawing and scaling it when applicable. In the language we use procedures to represent the data objects that will be combined in the final drawing and we make sure that all operations conducted on these procedures are algebraically closed. These features allow generating patterns of any complexity. For our implementation, we use the LISP functional programming language -- more accurately, the Scheme dialect. The presentation is based on "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", Abelson & Sussman Hope to see you there! The GhentFPG organizing committee, Andy Georges Jeroen Janssen Jasper Van der Jeugt