[Caml-list] REMINDER: CUFP 2011 deadline June 15th

[Yaron Minsky <yminsky@gmail.com>]

CUFP is a workshop for commercial users of functional programming, and
the dealine for proposals is fast approaching.  If you use OCaml (or
any other functional language) for practical applications, then you
should consider applying!  CUFP is a lot of fun, and this year it will
be happening in Asia for the first time, in Tokyo.  As usual, CUFP is
co-located with ICFP.  You can find the call for presentations here:

   http://cufp.org/2011-call-presentations

and I've also included a text version below:

===============================================
CUFP Workshop
Sponsored by SIGPLAN, Co-located with ICFP 2011
Tokyo, Japan
Sep 22-24
Proposal Submission Deadline 15 June 2011
===============================================

Functional programming languages have been a hot topic of academic
research for over 35 years, and they have seen an ever larger
practical impact in settings ranging from tech startups to financial
firms to biomedical research labs. At the same time, a vigorous
community of programmers employing functional languages has come into
existence.  CUFP is designed to serve this community. The annual CUFP
workshop is a place where people can see how others are using
functional programming to solve real world problems; where
practitioners meet and collaborate; where language designers and users
can share ideas about the future of their favorite language; and where
one can learn practical techniques and approaches for putting
functional programming to work.

Giving a CUFP Talk
==================

If you have experience using functional languages in a practical
setting, we invite you to submit a proposal to give a talk at the
workshop.  We're looking for two kinds of talks:

**Experience reports** are typically 25 minutes long, and aim to inform
participants about how functional programming plays out in real-world
applications, focusing especially on lessons learned and insights
gained. Experience reports don't need to be highly technical;
reflections on the commercial, management, or software engineering
aspects are, if anything, more important.

**Technical talks** are also 25 minutes long, and should focus on teaching
the audience something about a particular technique or methodology,
from the point of view of someone who has seen it play
out in practice.  These talks could cover anything from techniques for
building functional concurrent applications, to managing dynamic
reconfigurations, to design recipes for using types effectively in
large-scale applications.  While these talks will often be based on a
particular language, they should be accessible to a broad range of
programmers.

If you are interested in offering a talk, or nominating someone to do
so, send an e-mail to avsm2(at)cl(dot)cam(dot)ac(dot)uk or
yminsky(at)janestreet(dot)com by **15 June 2011** with a short description
of what you'd like to talk about or what you think your nominee should
give a talk about. Such descriptions should be about one page long.

There will be a short scribes report of the presentations and discussions
but not of the details of individual talks, as the meeting is intended to
be more a discussion forum than a technical interchange.  *You do
not need to submit a paper*, just a proposal for your talk!

Program Committee

-----------------
* Anil Madhavapeddy (University of Cambridge)
* Yaron Minsky      (Jane Street)
* Jun Furuse        (Standard Chartered)
* Marius Eriksen    (Twitter Inc.)
* Michael Williams  (Ericsson)
* Mike McClurg      (Citrix Systems R&D)
* R. Kent Dybvig    (Indiana University)
* Richard Minerich  (Bayard Rock)
* Sally Browning    (Galois)
* Shankar Natarajan (SRI Inc.)

More information
----------------
For more information on CUFP, including videos of presentations from
previous years, take a look at the CUFP website at <http://cufp.org>.
Note that presenters, like other attendees, will need to register for
the event.  Presentations will be video taped and presenters will be
expected to sign an ACM copyright release form.  Acceptance and
rejection letters will be sent out by July 15th.

Guidance on giving a great CUFP talk
-------------------------------
* **Focus on the interesting bits**: Think about what will distinguish
  your talk, and what will engage the audience, and focus there.
  There are a number of places to look for those interesting bits.
* **Setting**: There are a few areas where FP is pretty well
  established, including formal verification, financial processing and
  server-side web-services.  An unusual setting can be a source of
  interest.  If you're deploying FP-based mobile UIs or building
  servers on oil rigs, then the challenges of that scenario are worth
  focusing on.  Did FP help or hinder in adapting to the setting?
* **Social**: as with any new technology, there are often barriers to
  gaining acceptance within an organisation (be it a startup or a big
  corporation). Did you face any objections with your choice of
  language (e.g. hiring worries, risk of new technology, training
  difficulty). How did this pan out and are there lessons in there for
  others?
* **Technology**: The CUFP audience is hungry to learn about how FP
  techniques work in practice.  What design patterns have you applied,
  and to what areas? Did you use functional reactive programming for
  user interfaces, or DSLs for playing chess, or fault-tolerant actors
  for large scale geological data processing?  Teach us something
  about the techniques you used, and why we should consider using them
  ourselves.
* **Getting things done**: How did you deal with large software
  development in the absence of a myriad of pre-existing support that
  are often expected in larger commercial environments (IDEs, coverage
  tools, debuggers, profilers) and without larger, proven bodies of
  libraries? Did you hit any brick walls that required support from
  the community?
* **Don't just be a cheerleader**: It's easy to write a rah-rah talk
  about how well FP worked for you, but CUFP is more interesting when
  the talks also spend time on what _doesn't_ work.  Even when the
  results were all great, you should spend more time on the challenges
  along the way than on the parts that went smoothly.
* **Don't go too fast**: CUFP talks are short --- you have 25 minutes
  to get your point across.  So don't rush through a lot of technical
  material at high speed.
* **Keep your slides light**: Don't put too much on your slides.  You
  especially shouldn't be reading sentences from your slides
  aloud. Slides are best when used for keeping track of the broad
  structure of your talk, and presenting code snippets or graphics.
  Also, keep your font sizes nice and big so people can read from the
  back of the room!
* **Give a talk that you would love**: As a practitioner of functional
  programming, ask yourself what topics *you* would like to hear more
  about, and guide your talk towards those areas.