Haskell

The Haskell programming language is a comparatively young purely functional member of the Miranda family. Its main features include its strong type system, declarative style, concise syntax, and clean structure. A to my knowledge unique trait of Haskell, at least among programming languages "in practical use", is the actual absence of nonfunctional side effects in the core language. That is, in Haskell the statement of referential transparency is /true/. As to the elegance of the of course nonetheless given provisions for expressing inherently imperative processes, I/O especially, let the following two quotes suffice: "How to declare an imperative" (Philip Wadler, [1]) and "Haskell is the world's finest imperative programming language" (Simon P.J. in [2]).

Contrary to the frequently found notion of Haskell being a language of more "academic interest", it is in my opinion much rather the case that Haskell can excellently express applications of direct practical utility without sacrificing the language's academic assets at all. See [3], [4], and [5] for documentation.

The 45-minute talk will briefly sketch the basic concepts of the language and then open into a (as I hope) exciting tour of some programming highlights, in order to provide a loose outlook into Haskell and transfer some of my excitement about this language to interested hackers.