Zürich Friends of Haskell

The Zürich Friends of Haskell is a club founded to foster the worldwide knowledge of functional programming, and Haskell in particular. We organise meetups and events in the Zürich area.


About us

The HaskellerZ meetup group has been around since 2011. After organising many meetups and events, in particular ZuriHac, which attracts people from all over the world, there was a need to formalise our group a bit more.

In the short term, this allows us to work together better with sponsors for ZuriHac. In the long term, however, we would like to guarantee the long-time success of a Zurich-based Haskell interest group, not dependent on one or two key volunteers.

The rules are set up so that we encourage non-monetary contributions (e.g. giving a talk). Of course, membership is optional and not required to attend any of our events.

Become a member!

For members, we ask a yearly contribution of either:

  1. giving at least one talk at the Zurich HaskellerZ meetup,
  2. helping organize ZuriHac in an official role,
  3. serving on the board of directors for the Zurich Friends of Haskell, or
  4. providing other voluntary work asked for by the board of directors.

Sign up for Membership

Occasionally, we reach out to our members with volunteering opportunities. Also, once a year we would send you an email to confirm and update the membership.


Last meetup

M. Etter & F. Mehta: Towards Type-Directed API Search for Mainstream Languages

Thursday 28 November, 19:15

After a short lightning talk on the topic last year, Marc Etter and Farhad Mehta are back with a talk about type-based search for non-ML languages. TL;DR: In case you like Hoogle, and want to know how the Curry-Howard correspondence could be used as inspiration to implement something like Hoogle for mainstream languages such as Java or TypeScript, this talk is for you.

Software developers spend a lot of their time finding and composing pre-existing functions from various libraries. Almost all developers today use general-purpose search engines for this search. Specialized search engines such as Hoogle for Haskell additionally use type information to improve this search, and have been successful for some typed functional programming languages. The options currently available for type-directed search for mainstream object-oriented languages is limited. Existing approaches for these languages do not have first-class support for subtyping or parametric polymorphism. The splitting and composition of a desired functionality into and from a number of pre-existing functions is also a task that needs to be done manually. In this talk we present a proof-search-based approach to type-directed search with first-class support for subtyping, parametric polymorphism, splitting, and composition. The approach is language agnostic, and can be specialized to simultaneously support multiple typed object-oriented languages. Given that most mainstream languages fall under this category, this approach would extend the benefits of type-directed search to the majority of programmers. As a proof of concept, we will demonstrate typesearch.dev: a running implementation of the core language-agnostic approach and extended to support the Java programming language. Further extensions would allow the tool to simultaneously support multiple programming languages using the same query syntax.

This talk was originally given at the Type-Driven Development (TyDe) Workshop at the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) in Milan, Italy on[masked].

As usual, there will be the opportunity for drinks and socializing after the talk. There is a Zurihac organizers meeting right before it, so if you're interested in volunteering, please feel free to sign up for that as well!

Past meetups


ZuriHac

Our main yearly event is the organisation of ZuriHac, a yearly Haskell Hackathon that attracts over 300 attendees. It is probably one of the oldest and definitely the largest Haskell Hackathon currently in existence.

The first ZuriHac was organised in 2010 at the Zürich Google office by Johan Tibell and Christophe Poucet. Currently, we are organising it at the Rapperswil-Jona campus of OST, with the help of many Zürich Friends of Haskell members and volunteers.


Videos

We try to record all of our meetups and keynotes so Friends of Haskell who are not in the Zürich area can enjoy the content as well.

This playlist contains all our Haskell-related videos.

We have also collected the slides of the presentations in this repository. Unfortunately, the collection is currently incomplete.


Board

Current board members of the Zürich Friends of Haskell association:

Past members:


Donations

All our events are free to participants. In order to cover our costs, we accept individual donations as well as corporate sponsorships. For more information about sponsorships, please contact us at [email protected].

IBAN: CH55 0900 0000 1500 0655 2
BIC: POFICHBEXXX
Account holder: Zurich Friends of Haskell, 6300 Zug, Switzerland
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