ICFP 2017, day 1

I’m attending ICFP 2017 this year, and my plan is to end each day by writing about my impressions. As a bonus, this entry will also discuss my day of arrival (Sunday, where I did not attend any presentations).

Arrival

ICFP this year is held at Oxford. One particularly nice effect of this is that accomodation is at the many colleges, with signup via a simple web form on the conference page. This is vastly superior to hunting for dinky hotels yourself! I was quartered at Lady Margaret Hall, and even if the room was not as objectively “nice” as a similarly priced hotel, the convenience is easily worth the premium. An added bonus is that all the colleges are guaranteed to be within reasonable walking distance of the conference venue (the Andrew Wiles Building). I found it odd that while the room was equipped with a water heater, it was bundled with only two pockets of tea, accompanied by seven small canisters of milk. No wonder England lost her Empire.

The Sessions

I will not write about everything I saw - only what I considered particularly interesting (or had enough energy to take notes). I liked the auditorium was equipped, which was well equipped with desks suitable for taking notes. This is something I missed at PLDI. The auditorium was extremely full during the keynote, and attendance did not drop significantly later in the day. Oddly, despite this seemingly being the main auditorium for the mathematics department, coffee was not allowed. How do they intend to teach mathematics under such circumstances?

The keynote was by Chris Martens, and on “unforeseen interactions with computers”. Sounds like management-speak for “bugs” to me! Another way of putting it, and which I think captured the essence of the keynote quite well, is “human-computer collaboration”. The keynote was about using logic as an intermediate language for conversing with computers, and for driving the search algorithms that are at the core of (classical) AI, as opposed to modern data-driven statistical approaches. Nice to see that the old ideas are still around! I always found them much nicer than the modern trend of turning everything into a matrix multiplication.

There was a presentation on a DSL for video editing/manipulation, called Super 8 Languages for Making Movies. The talk was really about applying the principle of “language-oriented programming”, by using the facilities provided by Racket to define a stack of eight DSLs that provided gradually more refined ways to manipulate video. The resulting language looked quite like the popular combinator-based approaches to image manipulation, although no doubt the addition of the time dimension adds some extra opportunities.

The next presentation was Testing and Debugging Functional Reactive Programming, which started out by showing a nice Arrow-ized library for doing FRP. They then moved on to showing QuickCheck-based generation of event streams to detect bugs (cool!), and an interactive debugger that allowed replay and modification to reproduce bugs (even cooler!).

Next up was Lock-Step Simulation Is Child’s Play, which discusses how synchronising distributed real-time applications (such as multiplayer games) is very difficult in the presence of latency. The authors showed how purity (unsurprisingly) makes the whole exercise much easier, by providing guaranteed-safe replay of events once it information from other nodes are received. The entire thing was done in the context of code.world, an initiative that uses Haskell to teach mathematics to middle school children.

Last in the first session was Scaling up Functional Programming Education: Under the Hood of the OCaml MOOC, which discussed a large online course that the authors had run. Out of 7000 enrolled students, 2418 showed up at course start, and somewhere between 500 and 1000 actually completed the course. Not a bad retention statistic. The talk was mostly about the technical infrastructure they used, which in particular involved fully automatic grading, and a policy of zero installation - everything ran in the browser.

A later presentation was A Pretty But Not Greedy Printer, which showed a new prettyprinting library. This one, conceptually, contains “alternatives”, which can be used to specify different ways of printing something, depending on available space. In contrast to greedy approaches, this can generate more pleasing output by using non-local information. The downside is significant slowdown (often an order of magnitude slower than current Wadler-style prettyprinters), but modern machines print fast enough anyway.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking presentation of the day was Generic Functional Parallel Algorithms: Scan and FFT by Conal Elliott. He takes a category/generic programming-based approach to parallel programming, one that emphasises the structure of the recursive patterns rather than array index arithmetic. I am definitely in favour of trying to find an alternative to low-level array programming. However, I feel the presentation was missing a “and then a miracle occurs” step to turn the proposed technique into efficient code. This talk definitely convinced me to take a deep hard look at the paper, though.

The last presentation I attended was Effect-Driven QuickChecking of Compilers, which showed a technique to generate interesting test programs for OCaml compilers. The trick is to avoid “boring” programs, which are syntax- or type-incorrect, and also avoid programs that exhibit undefined behaviour (turns out OCaml has undefined evaluation order - I thought it was always right to left). I would like to try their approach on generating test programs for my own compiler.

I was a bit skeptical after initially browsing the ICFP programme, but I have been pleasantly surprised. This year’s ICFP is so far quite enjoyable, and significantly better than last year, which I did not like overmuch.