The 2013 edition of Functional Programming eXchange is just over a month away, so if you’re not already signed up now the time to do so. When we first started Functional Programming eXchange back in 2009 there were very few functional programming conference’s aimed at developers, over years this has changed quite dramatically and now even if we just talk about about functional programming events in the UK hosted at Skills Matter we have Clojure eXchange, Haskell eXchange, Progressive F#, Scala Days and Scala eXchange. What makes Functional Programming eXchange different from these other conferences is that rather than focus on a specific functional programming language we have the freedom to bring together the talks from a broad range of functional languages, to bring there respective communities together to swap ideas and it gives us a chance to include some talks from languages that do not yet have there own conferences.
I’m very pleased with the way the schedule has turned out, there were other talks I’d loved to have included, but the schedule already is full to busting! I’m very pleased to have both Simon Peyton-Jones and Don Syme the men who are the driving forces behind the research and development of Haskell and F# respectively. Simon will start the day by giving a “Adventures with Types” in which he’ll give us an overview of some of the latest development in the Haskell type system and Don will round the day off by giving a talk “F# in an Open Source World” in which he’ll talk about the changing way the community contributes to F#.
I’m also very pleased to have a talk from Alain Frisch of LexiFi. LexiFi are one of the pioneers of using functional programming industry and have been helping their customers tackle complex problems in the financial domain using OCaml since the early 2000s. Alain has also made many contributions to the OCaml compiler itself and he’ll be covering both these topics in his talk so it really is one not to miss.
David Pollak and Paul Dale will both the be giving Scala related talks, David will be telling us about the latest developments in his popular web programming framework “Lift” and Paul will talking about his experinces using Scala and the Akka framework in successful real world projects. Robert Rees will be giving a talk that covers both Scala and Clojure and will be giving talk that compares both language with a view to helping developers decided why you might chose one or the other for a specific project.
Nic Ferrier will be keeping fans of lisp style languages happy with his talk on ELNode, a node.js style web server that written in Emacs Lisp, so can be hosted inside the famous emacs text editor.
Adam Granicz also has a talk which pushes the boundaries of the web and text editing, he’ll be showing off an IDE in a web browser for the F# language.
Hope to see you there, it’ll certainly be a day pact full of learning and fun!