Joachim Breitner's Homepage

Another on-my-the-journey-back blog post; this time from the Frankfurt Airport Train Station – my flight was delayed (if I knew that I could have watched the remaining Lightning Talks), and so was my train, but despite 5min of running through the Airport just not enough. And now that the free 30 Minutes of Railway Station Internet are used up, I have nothing else to do but blog...

Last week I was attending ICFP 2014 in Gothenburg, followed by the Haskell Symposium and the Haskell Implementors Workshop. The justification to attend was the paper on Safe Coercions (joint work with Richard Eisenberg, Simon Peyton Jones and Stephanie Weirich), although Richard got to hold the talk, and did so quite well. So I got to leisurely attend the talks, while fighting the jet-lag that I brought from Portland.

There were – as expected – quite a few interesting talks. Among them the first keynote, Kathleen Fisher on the need for formal methods in cars and toy-quadcopters and unmanned battle helicopters, which made me conclude that my Isabelle skills might eventually become relevant in practical applications. And did you know that if someone gains access to your car’s electronics, they can make the seat belt pull you back hard?

Stefanie Weirich’s keynote (and the subsequent related talks by Jan Stolarek and Richard Eisenberg) on what a dependently typed Haskell would look like and what we could use it for was mouth-watering. I am a bit worried that Haskell will be become a bit obscure for newcomers and people that simply don’t want to think about types too much, on the other hand it seems that Haskell as we know it will always stay there, just as a subset of the language.

Similarly interesting were refinement types for Haskell (talks by Niki Vazou and by Eric Seidel), in the form of LiquidTypes, something that I have not paid attention to yet. It seems to be a good way for more high assurance in Haskell code.

Finally, the Haskell Implementors Workshop had a truckload of exciting developments in and around Haskell: More on GHCJS, Partial type signatures, interactive type-driven development like we know it from Agda, the new Haskell module system and amazing user-defined error messages – the latter unfortunately only in Helium, at least for now.

But it’s not the case that I only sat and listened. During the Haskell Implementors Workshop I held a talk “Contributing to GHC” with a live demo of me fixing a (tiny) bug in GHC, with the aim of getting more people to hack on GHC (slides, video). The main message here is that it is not that big of deal. And despite me not actually saying much interesting in the talk, I got good feedback afterwards. So if it now actually motivates someone to contribute to GHC, I’m even more happier.

And then there is of course the Hallway Track. I discussed the issues with fusing a left fold (unfortunately, without a great solution). In order to tackle this problem more systematically, John Wiegley and I created the beginning of a “List Fusion Lab”, i.e. a bunch of list benchmark and the possibility to compare various implementations (e.g. with different RULES) and various compilers. With that we can hopefully better assess the effect of a change to the list functions.

PS: The next train is now also delayed, so I’ll likely miss my tram and arrive home even later...

PPS: I really have to update my 10 year old picture on my homepage (or redesign it completely). Quite a few people knew my name, but expected someone with shoulder-long hair...

PPPS: Haskell is really becoming mainstream: I just talked to a randomly chosen person (the boy sitting next to me in the train), and he is a Haskell enthusiast, building a structured editor for Haskell together with his brother. And all that as a 12th-grader...