Haskell Exchange 2012 talks

Summary: The talks from the Haskell Exchange 2012 are online.

The Haskell Exchange 2012 took place last week. We had a good range of speakers, who all gave excellent talks. I would like to say thanks to all the speakers and to Skills Matter for organising and running the event. The talks are all available online, and I thought I'd just go through them now:

Simon Peyton Jones argued that purity and types are the key to Haskell. The purity thing is without doubt true - people cheat if they are allowed to, but Haskell discourages impurity both through the IO monad (effects are explicit) and community pressure (don't use unsafePerformIO unsafely). I also think that laziness combined with an aggressively optimising that messes up unsafePerformIO at the slightest opportunity have also helped (impurity always comes back to bite).

Simon Marlow explained the async package, showing how you can turn complex problems into simple ones with a simple mechanism that looks highly reusable. I have previously used a similar idea in my F# coding (although not nearly as thoroughly thought out), and been happy with the results - I suspect Simon's version will be even more useful. I particularly enjoyed the use of STM - it's rarely a concurrency solution I think of (I'm a threads and locks kind of person), but seeing it used so elegantly makes me want to experiment more.

Lennart Augustsson talked about embedded languages - where you write a language that looks a lot like Haskell, inside a Haskell program, only to find out later that it wasn't Haskell at all. Lennart is clearly the expert at these languages, having covered C, Basic and now financial combinators. Once you have these inner languages, you can take them in all kinds of directions, including right down to optimised assembly code.

Blake Rain gave an introduction to Yesod. I had read the Yesod documentation a while back, but the had trouble figuring out where to start, and what it was that mattered. Blake did both the sales pitch, and the beginners guide - I'll certainly be trying a Yesod at some point. In particular I really liked the type-safe routing, that would certainly have some in handy in my ASP developer days.

Duncan Coutts gave updates on the Cloud Haskell work, which in only a year, has gone from a research project to a practical library/tool that can be distributed at scale. The work covers details like how you distribute, why you distribute and how the model was designed (basically, copy Erlang). Another interesting aspect was how the real world development challenges, both the diverse nature of network/cloud computing, and how you can fund turning an academic idea into a user tool.

Rob Harrop showed how Ruby, Erlang and Haskell can all communicate using a message passing framework (AMQP). I certainly prefer Haskell, and go fully Haskell where possible, but a heterogeneous environment provides an easier migration path. Rob showed how to start and stop Haskell processes, switch elements from Ruby to Haskell and back again, all while a website was continuously responding to requests. This development style certainly provides an easy route in for Haskell, but also highlighted that Haskell still lacks some of the nicer sugar over AMQP that Ruby provides.

The final session was an open session where people discussed topics relating to Haskell. This session was fun, but I felt it could be better. I think it meandered at some points, and had a core of people who talked, but a large number of people who just watched. I'm not sure how I'd do things better, but it felt like some of the questions after the talks (Simon Peyton Jones and Duncan Coutts talks in particular) lead to more thorough discussions. I know this can be a problem for Haskell Symposium "Future of Haskell" discussions too, so perhaps there is some scope for tweaking the format?