Simon Peyton Jones will be giving two Haskell-related talks at OSCON in July! As far as I know, this will be the first time that Haskell gets an airing at a general-interest conference. Simon is a fantastic speaker, so if you were going to OSCON anyway, you absolutely should not miss his talks.

One of Simon’s talks is to be a three-hour Haskell tutorial. It’s explicitly not aimed at “pointy-headed academics”, so if you like to get practical things done quickly and safely, this should be just the job.

The other talk will be about nested data parallelism, which is a long-dormant subject that holds great promise. The idea here is that we’d like to be able to write parallel programs that are composable and modular, but that retain good performance characteristics, while not doing great violence to our source as we attempt to scale.

This is a hard problem, as it requires solving a number of not obviously related subproblems. A close imperative-land approximation I’ve seen to the work that the NPH people are doing is Charm++, which is itself very cool. And you can see from how long the Charm++ has been around that this isn’t a short-term campaign.