How about a functional programming conference?
I’ve been kicking around an idea for a US-based conference (probably changing cities each year) for working (or aspiring) functional programmers. I am aware of events like CUFP, but I am thinking of something larger, US-based, and more practical in focus.
I am also interested in the idea of mixing the following conference styles:
- Sessions – traditional speaker-focused sessions
- Workshops – long-form, speaker-led workshops on particular projects or languages
- Personal skills – working time to improve your craft by doing exercises either individually or in pairs/groups (koans, katas, etc)
- Projects – practicing those skills by working on open source projects
Languages of interest might include Erlang, Scala, Clojure, F#, Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, Scheme, Racket, etc but the focus would be on commercial programmers.
If you might be interested in such a conference, please give me some feedback! The form is also embedded below for your convenience…
Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write Clojure for a living and currently work for 
I think functional is gaining steam as a melding of functional and imperative. Just as an example, QConn has lots of seminars on functional programming. Partially, I bet, it’s because of the melding of “dirty” functional languages.
Javascript as a functional friendly language has really taken off, C# has lambdas, partial functions, async workflows, implicit typing, higher order functions, f# (obviously) but it also works the other way and allows for mutability when necessary, etc.
I think the real power of functional comes when its impure. I haven’t used Clojure myself but I am of the understanding that its analogous to f# and .net (i.e. it can call Java libraries which are written imperatively since its all on the JVM).