Today was SAPLING 2013, the Sydney Area Programming Languages Interest Group. This year it was hosted at Macquarie University.

There were many talks of interest to functional programmers, in particular a keynote from Phil Wadler on a compositional language-integrated query system, talks on flow fusion optimisation and a FFI for Accelerate respectively from fellow PLSers Amos Robinson and Robert Clifton-Everest, a talk from Ben Lippmeier on capabilities and coeffects for his new DDC core calculus, and Fritz Henglein’s APLAS talk on generic sorting and searching.

I also presented our trustworthy filesystems work, loosely based on Gabriele Keller’s presentation at PLOS of our recent paper.

Further afield, there were also some interesting talks from ANU students on their practical work on managed runtimes, and some talks from the Victoria University of Wellington on some more conventional imperative and object oriented language designs.

Many thanks to Phil Wadler for his characteristically soul-destroying questions, and to Tony Sloane for organising the event, which I think all would agree was a great success.