CUFP: One Great Reason to Attend
16 August 2012

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The Commercial Users of Functional Programming conference is being held this year in Copenhagen, from September 13th to 15th. I'm on the committee, and thus it's my job to convince you to attend. Here's why you should go.

Let's start with some assumptions:

  • You create computer programs.
  • These programs are reasonably complex, and their success is important.

If the above holds then your skill as a programmer is critical to your professional success. Your skill as a programmer is your ability to create and wield abstractions to concisely and quickly express your thoughts. Functional programming languages are the breeding ground for new abstractions, and CUFP has two days of tutorials on a range of functional languages. You are unlikely to find this content anywhere else. Thus you should attend CUFP. QED.

You don't need to use a functional programming language to benefit from CUFP. I'm barely even a programmer these days. I do a lot of machine learning stuff which is as much maths as it is code. And I do a lot of marketing, and customer support, and presentations, and so on. I also recognise that if the software doesn't work none of the other stuff matters. This is why I'm excited to see a tutorial on Concurrent Haskell. I don't use Haskell, but I'm sure Haskell has some great ideas for managing concurrency and I can apply those ideas to problems I have in languages I use. Between the seven tutorials and thirteen talks I'm sure there will be something that addresses your domain.

So, see you in Copenhagen?