HaskellX Bytes talk next Tuesday

I'm talking about "Static Analysis in Haskell" at HaskellX Bytes next Tuesday (11th July), in London UK. Registration is free. The abstract is:

Haskell is a strongly typed programming language, which should be well suited to static analysis - specifically any insights about the program which don't require running the program. Alas, while type systems are becoming increasingly powerful, other forms of static analysis aren't advancing as fast. In this talk we'll give an overview of some of the forms of non-type-based static analysis that do exist, from the practical (GHC warnings, HLint, Weeder) to the research (LiquidHaskell, Catch).

I'm a big fan of static analysis, so this will be part summary, part sales pitch, and part call to arms. Followed by beer.

Clarification: I originally got the day wrong, and the url persists the original incorrect day. The talk is on Tuesday 11th July.

Upcoming talk: Writing build systems with Shake, 16 Aug 2016, London

Summary: I'm giving a talk on Shake.

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be giving a talk/hack session on Shake as part of the relatively new "Haskell Hacking London" meetup.

Title: Writing build systems with Shake

Date: Tuesday, August 16, 2016. 6:30 PM

Location: Pusher Office, 28 Scrutton Street, London

Abstract: Shake is a general purpose library for expressing build systems - forms of computation, with caching, dependencies and more besides. Like all the best stuff in Haskell, Shake is generic, with details such as "files" written on top of the generic library. Of course, the real world doesn't just have "files", but specifically has "C files that need to be compiled with gcc". In this hacking session we'll look at how to write Shake rules, what existing functions people have already layered on top of Shake for compiling with specific compilers, and consider which rules are missing. Hopefully by the end we'll have a rule that people can use out-of-the-box for compiling C++ and Haskell.

To put it another way, it's all about layering up. Haskell is a programming language. Shake is a Haskell library for dependencies, minimal recomputation, parallelism etc. Shake also provides as a layer on top (but inside the same library) to write rules about files, and ways to run command line tools. Shake doesn't yet provide a layer that compiles C files, but it does provide the tools with which you can write your own. The aim of this talk/hack session is to figure out what the next layer should be, and write it. It is definitely an attempt to move into the SCons territory of build systems, which knows how to build C etc. out of the box.

Upcoming talk to the Cambridge UK Meetup, Thursday 13 Aug (Shake 'n' Bake)

I'll be talking at the Cambridge NonDysFunctional Programmers Meetup this coming Thursday (13 Aug 2015). Doors open at 7:00pm with talk 7:30-8:30pm, followed by beer/food. I'll be talking about Shake 'n' Bake. The abstract is:

Shake is a Haskell build system, an alternative to Make, but with more powerful and accurate dependencies. I'll cover how to build things with Shake, and why I laugh at non-Monadic build systems (which covers most things that aren't Shake). Shake is an industrial quality library, with a website at http://shakebuild.com.

Bake is a Haskell continuous integration system, an alternative to Travis/Jenkins, but designed for large semi-trusted teams. Bake guarantees that all code arriving in your master branch passes all tests on all platforms, while using as few resources as possible, allowing you to have hours of tests, 100's of commits a day and one a few lonely test servers. Bake is held together with duct tape.

I look forward to seeing people there.

November talks

Summary: I'll be talking at CodeMesh 2014 on 5th November and FP Days on 20th November.

I am giving two talks in London this month:

CodeMesh 2014 - Gluing Things Together with Haskell, 5th Nov

I'll be talking about how you can use Haskell as the glue language in a project, instead of something like Bash. In particular, I'll cover Shake, NSIS and Bake. The abstract reads:

A large software project is more than just the code that goes into a release, in particular you need lots of glue code to put everything together - including build systems, test harnesses, installer generators etc. While the choice of language for the project is often a carefully considered decision, more often than not the glue code consists of shell scripts and Makefiles. But just as functional programming provides a better way to write the project, it also provides a better way to write the glue code. This talk covers some of the technologies and approaches we use at Standard Chartered to glue together the quant library. In particular, we'll focus on the build system where we replaced 10,000 lines of Makefiles with 1,000 lines of Haskell which builds the project twice as fast. We'll also look at how to test programs using Haskell, how to replace ancillary shell scripts with Haskell, and how to use Haskell to generate installers.

FP Days 2014 - Building stuff with Shake, 20th Nov

I'll be giving a tutorial on building stuff with Shake. It's going to be less sales pitch, more how you structure a build system, and how you use Shake effectively. The abstract reads:

Build systems are a key part of any large software project, relied upon by both developers and release processes. It's important that the build system is understandable, reliable and fast. This talk introduces the Shake build system which is intended to help meet those goals. Users of Shake write a Haskell program which makes heavy use of the Shake library, while still allowing the full power of Haskell to be used. The Shake library provides powerful dependency features along with useful extras (profiling, debugging, command line handling). This tutorial aims to help you learn how to think about writing build systems, and how to make those thoughts concrete in Shake.