Several Special Interest Groups (SIGs) unite people every week or fortnight to discuss matters which interest everyone that shows up in the meeting, here in the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering Group (DSSE) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) of the University of Southampton.
By the end of this years International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) Contest it was thought that a new group, about programming should be created. A group that could discuss more practical issues like language implementation, specific programming languages, data structures, algorithms and performance.
After several discussions in and out of our beloved coffee room, the idea of having a Functional Programming Group came up. Languages of interest would be SML, Scheme and Haskell. Of these, the latter was the chosen one. It’s a language nobody knew and everyone was eager to learn. It markets itself as “Purely Functional” which goes well with the group name. And so… off we go!