Keynote 2: Towards Haskell in the cloud
Simon Peyton-Jones (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, England)
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/

Abstract: Haskell is a great language for writing parallel applications, but until now "parallel" has always meant "shared memory". The obvious paradigm for cloud applications in Haskell is actor-style concurrency based on message passing; Erlang is the brand leader here.

In this talk I'll describe how we've implemented an Erlang-style concurrency library in Haskell. Of course this isn't a new idea: Scala Actors and Akka do something very similar in Scala, although there are some interesting differences in the details. More fundamentally, we have not done this before in Haskell because of a key obstacle, namely serialising arbitrary closures. The main technical contribution of the talk is an elegant way to solve this problem, exploiting (yet again) the type system to good effect.