The (arguably) greatest city in the U.S. now (finally) has a users group for (unarguably) the greatest programming language anywhere. We're very happy to announce the inaugural meeting of the New York Haskell Users Group. We intend this group to be welcoming to new developers, but with enough substance to keep old Haskell hands interested and amused. If you're in the area but can't make it, you can join the meetup regardless at http://www.meetup.com/NY-Haskell/ to stay informed of future events. We plan to have a mix of talks and experience reports at all levels, so if you will be passing through town and might have something to say, let us know! Two Haskell Talks: Practical Data Processing With Haskell _and_ Putting Cloud Haskell to Work Wednesday, November 14, 2012 7:00 PM To 9:00 PM Pivotal Labs, 841 Broadway New York, NY RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/NY-Haskell/ We're kicking off the New York Haskell Users Group with two great talks, one for people just getting started and one for those with some experience already. Both should be accessible and enjoyable no matter how much (or little) you already know. Food and refreshments will be provided, courtesy of the generosity of Pivotal Labs, and after the talks, we're planning to keep the discussion going over food and drink at a nearby establishment. 7pm - Practical Data Processing With Haskell: Ozgun Ataman will give an introductory talk on Haskell, diving right in with how you can start using Haskell for practical data manipulation tasks today. You'll be introduced to a typical setup for Haskell development and given a demonstration of how a common data format (CSV, JSON, etc.) can be parsed, processed and finally output using Haskell. The talk will include a small actual Haskell program to be modified live and some commentary around using Haskell in practical applications. 8pm - Putting Cloud Haskell to Work for Distributed Computing: Gershom Bazerman will give an overview of the new distributed-process library that implements Cloud Haskell, providing computation across heterogeneous nodes through a message passing interface. He will discuss what this new tool provides out of the box, and what you'll have to bring to the table. The talk will include some code samples using the new library, as well as some experience about what it's like to use Haskell for distributed computing in the real world. Speaker Biographies: Ozgun Ataman is the founder of Soostone, a managment consulting and analytics company built on Haskell. He is the author of many open-source Haskell libraries, and is a contributor to the Snap web framework. Gershom Bazerman is a developer at S&P Capital IQ. He is most well known in the Haskell community as the author of the JMacro library for programmatic generation of JavaScript, and for one well-received April fools joke.