Geek in progress

During the weekend of November 5-7, 2010, The Ghent Functional Programming Group and the ZeusWPI organised a Haskell hackathon, the first of these events to take place on Belgian soil.

Thanks to Ghent University, we had obtained a nice venue: a refurbished coal power plant, of which we could use the upper floor, where the huge silos for storing the coals were located.

The event entailed three days. On Friday we had the registration, the hey-cool-to-see-you-are-here-too and general get-to-know each other, followed by a very nice talk by Miran Lipovača, the author of the ‘Learn you a Haskell for great good’ book (soon to be available from your favorite bookshop(s)). From 5 p.m. onwards, we had the Functional Programming in Industry symposium, where Duncan Coutts, Romain and Donald Steward entertained the masses with great stories about using FP in their daily work. Since we be engineers, and the tradition of our department states that talks in the Jozef Plateau-room are followed by a reception (at least, when people defend their PhD. this is the case, but let’s ignore that little trivia for the moment), we also fed the masses with a bunch of excellent (220) sandwiches. Sadly, some were left over, even though the local folks ate more than (twice) their share once it became clear that there would be leftovers. No worries, we’re well trained, given the number of PhD’s defended every year.

The weekend itself was pretty much devoted to the actual hacking. Kenneth (boegel) and I found some support for our HaBench effort in the person of Yuriy Kashnikov. After a round of project introductions, the work began in earnest only to be briefly interrupted by the announcement that food was available, kindly provided by Het Stokbroodje (we paid, of course, but still, the food was yummy and they delivered on both Saturday and Sunday). The evening saw a march with a few hackers to Julien, Ghent’s moat famous french fries place (I’m told).

On Sunday, hacking continued and in the afternoon, a few 5-minute lightning talks were held by people who considered having made significant progress. I briefly talked about HaBench (slides (PDF)). The general reception was pretty good, I believe. Clearly, a new benchmark suite is highly desirable. Finally, we wrapped up and cleaned shop before the housekeeper came round to chase us out again.