Dear all, Ricardo Rodríguez and I are organizing an introductory OCaml course as part of the annual summer school of the University of Zaragoza in Spain. (This is the oldest summer university in the country, nearing its centennial anniversary!). The country’s computing programs are quite excellent, although we have found them to generally not pay serious attention to modern functional programming. Our goal is to use OCaml to begin to address this dearth.
In addition to the regular academic program we are planning a satellite event open to the general public. This is meant to introduce the OCaml ecosystem to a wider audience of students and academics, as well as professionals. As part of this, we would like to hold a round table discussion of industrial OCaml users to demonstrate the width and depth of practical uses of the language. There will be time for participants to present their work in more detail, if they wish to do so.
If you may be interested in participating or have any questions, feel free to write to me here or send email to either of us. The course is currently in its planning stages; it is scheduled to take place in early to mid July, in all likelihood in the city of Zaragoza and in hybrid format. The OCaml Software Foundation is backing the initiative and we thank them for their generous support.
Could you provide a few more details about the industrial users round table? Will it take place on a single day? Will it be in hybrid format as well? What would be the format of the discussion?
Thank you for your questions! Yes, the industry event will be hybrid. The final schedule will depend on the time zone constraints of remote presenters, but the event should take place over the course of one day. This is partly so it fits into the rest of the course schedule (registered participants are in principle required to attend), but also to make it easy for a broader audience to join in.
I expect there will be an official welcome from the university followed by an introduction. Then, there would be participant talks where they can present their companies and their work. These talks would be followed by the round table, moderated by the organizers and covering general discussion as well as fielding questions from the audience. Finally, there will be a chance for participants to discuss and network freely.
On a related note, I have broached the idea to @gasche of inviting someone from the OCaml development team. This would be so as to 1) give a talk about the language and its development, and/or 2) participate in a discussion with the organizers and audience. If other industry participants are involved in building the language ecosystem, it would make sense to invite them to a more central role in such a discussion.
It would likely be possible to schedule these two prongs over the course of the same day, say in morning and afternoon sessions.
I’m sure the regular sessions will be available to all participants. Ideally everyone will be joining live, either in person or by video call, but classes should be recorded as well. I don’t know whether there are any restrictions to make recordings public after the course; I’ll look into this.
On the other hand, the developer and industry sessions will be open to the general public by design, and there will be a public broadcast as well. I believe we’ll need to collect everyone’s approval before publishing a recording, but I think we’d like to do so if possible.
Were you interested mostly in this last part or also in the regular lectures?
Thanks Roberto, I am interested in everything. I would love to attend the course, but I doubt I can make it. It would be awesome if the sessions can be watched later. Even if it’s long after.
Hi Gabriel, if you or someone else wanted to attend but some parts of the schedule didn’t work, the lecture videos would surely be available on the same day, and we could have more out of hours time for questions and exercises for a few students (we have done this effectively on a previous occasion). If you think that could interest you, just write to Ricardo or to me and we can talk about it.
