The symposium on Trends in Functional Programming (TFP) is an international forum for researchers with interests in all aspects of functional programming, taking a broad view of current and future trends in the area. It aspires to be a lively environment for presenting the latest research results, and other contributions. See the call for papers for more details.
In 2025, the event is taking place in person in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. It will be a 4-day event, with TFPiE taking place on 13th January 2025, followed by TFP on 14th to 16th January.
TFP offers a friendly and constructive reviewing process designed to help less experienced authors succeed, with an opportunity for two rounds of review, both before and after the symposium itself. Authors thus have an opportunity to address reviewers’ concerns before the final decision on publication in the Proceedings is taken, in the light of previous reviews and discussions at the symposium.
TFP offers two “best paper” awards, the John McCarthy award for best paper, and the David Turner award for best student paper.
See the call for papers for details.
Registration
The early registration deadline will be 18th December 2024, late registration 6th January 2025. Further information to follow.
Keynotes
Nicolas Wu, Imperial College London (TFPiE keynote)
Graham Nelson, University of Oxford
Literate Programming and Cultural Practice
Literate programming, a dogma and doctrine in which commentary, reasoning and justification is mingled with code, got its distressingly in-your-face name at a time of gentle tussles for dominance among the Old Masters of computer science education: Donald Knuth, Edsger Dijkstra, Nicklaus Wirth, Christopher Strachey, and Tony Hoare. Literate programming can be seen as a radical, fresh manifesto very much of that era, a clarion call for a new hybrid literary form; or, as an attempt to look backwards, to encourage computer scientists to adopt stylistics of mathematical writing already two hundred years old. It can be seen as a humanist, as opposed to mechanistic, answer to a moral panic about program correctness, and the spectre of mass deaths from nuclear accidents and technological breakdown. Today, a generous verdict might be that LP was a brave idea which just didn’t scale. An ungenerous one, that it was never more than a page layout strategy for textbooks. Either way, though a handful of romantics do continue to use LP, it has passed into history as a cultural by-way, a road not taken. And yet: its real motivations go back to the age of flow-charts, have never gone away, and continue to be felt in the languages, package managers and development tools of the 2020s. LP made heavy use of macros and preprocessing, juvenile techniques (some say) which should have been thrown out with the last PDP-10: but, consider the sudden respectability of macros in production languages like Rust and Swift. LP mixed code with text, which (some say) is clumsy, verbose and misleading: but, consider the far-reaching consequences of Github’s decision to privilege Markdown files in its rendering of programs as websites, and how that has changed the way professionals present their work. My own view is that language designers, tool-chain authors and coding evangelists might benefit from a second, or even a first, look at literate programming. For all its faults it was a bid to make a practical study of one of the hardest coding questions of all: how are we to communicate and share our sprawling, broken, incomplete programs, with their half-articulated intentions always a shadowy presence behind them?
Kathrin Stark, Heriot-Watt University
A Verified Foreign Function Interface Between Coq and C
Important Dates
| Submission deadline (pre-symposium, full papers) | Wed 13th Nov 2024 (AOE) |
| Submission deadline (pre-symposium draft papers) | Wed 11th Dec 2024 (AOE) |
| Early registration | Wed 18th Dec 2024 |
| Late registration | Mon 6th Jan 2025 |
| TFPiE Workshop | Mon 13th Jan 2025 |
| TFP Symposium | Tue 14th to Thu 16th Jan 2025 |
| Submission deadline (post-symposium review) | Wed 19th Feb 2025 (AOE) |
Sponsors
To follow.
Organizing Committee
| Jeremy Gibbons | University of Oxford, UK | Programme Chair |
| Jason Hemann | Seton Hall University, US | Conference Chair |
| Peter Achten | Radboud University Nijmegen, NL | Publicity Chair |
| Marco T. Morazán | Seton Hall University, US | Steering Committee Chair |