Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) 2007

At the beginning of this month (October) I attended and presented at the CUFP event in Freiburg, Germany. The talk was on some of the work our group has been doing over the last year using F# including the XBox 360 title Halo 3 and on predicting ad clicks for Windows Live. The slides (thanks Ralf) are now available online and for those who couldn't make it videos of all the talks are expected soon. There were plenty of interesting talks throughout the day, including Chris Waterson of Liveops "... using continuation passing monads to encapsulate computation state and hide the complexity of the non-blocking I/O layer" with OCaml, which seemed to be in a similar direction to F# asynchronous workflows. The day ended with a discussion led by Don Syme on the subject of hiring functional programmers; where it emerged that the remaining attendees were actively seeking over 40 new hires. Finally it was time to enjoy the remainder of a hot sunny day and some quality German beer.

Phil