Open Tech Calendar

Thanks to Skyscanner for sponsoring our 12th November EdLambda meetup,
with free pizza and beer to lubricate our lambda senses. And thanks to
Adam Gundry, partner at Well Typed, for talking to us about his work.
So that Skyscanner know who they should expect to enter their
building, please get a free ticket from the EventBrite page.

When Thursday 12th November at 7pm
Where Skyscanner's offices, Quartermile One, 15 Lauriston Pl, Edinburgh
Who Adam Gundry, Well Typed.
Tickets www.eventbrite.co.uk

Title Overloaded record fields for Haskell

Abstract
A long-standing annoyance when using Haskell for large-scale
applications has been its rather limited record system. In particular,
field names cannot be reused across multiple datatypes, and while the
record update mechanism is very expressive, it does not compose well.
Over the years there have been many proposals for better systems, but no
concrete progress on implementation.

This is the story of how I foolishly set out to "solve the records
problem" over the summer of 2013, and how over two years later I've
still neither quite succeeded nor failed. I'll explain the new design
as it currently stands, showing how it decomposes into not one but three
separate language extensions, one of which provides interesting new
possibilities for writing programs that have nothing to do with records.
While it is always dangerous to predict the future, I'll outline what
you can and can't expect to see from this work in the upcoming GHC 8.0.