A short report on S-REPLS 15 and the Concurrency Workshop 2024

On 18-19 July 2024, the South of England Regional Programming Languages Seminar (S-REPLS) and Concurrency Workshop were successfully hosted at the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus, attracting over 60 attendees from academia and industry. Sponsored by VeTSS and by the University of Kent, this year’s gathering provided an excellent opportunity to explore the latest developments in programming languages and concurrency. The event featured distinguished talks by Nicolas Wu from Imperial College London and Peter O’Hearn from University College London.

S-REPLS serves as a regional forum for the programming languages community, offering a platform for researchers and professionals to share their work and exchange ideas. The Concurrency Workshop, held alongside S-REPLS, focused on key challenges in concurrent programming, focusing on improving the performance and correctness of multi-core and distributed systems.

Topics included formal verification, functional programming, concurrency, type theory and category theory, providing attendees with valuable insights into both fundamental concepts and practical tools for software development.

Nicolas Wu presented on the applications of algebraic effects in functional programming languages, showcasing how mathematical frameworks shape the design of reliable software. Meanwhile, Peter O’Hearn, co-creator of Separation Logic, explored formal verification techniques and their role in large-scale industrial contexts, such as at Facebook.

A particularly meaningful moment of the event was Prof. Simon Thompson’s memorial talk honoring Prof. David Turner, a former professor at the University of Kent. David Turner was a pioneering figure in functional programming and was best known for creating the Miranda programming language, which deeply influenced modern functional languages like Haskell. David Turner was supervised by famous computer scientists Christopher Strachey and Dana Scott and contributed significantly to the PL culture at Kent, a legacy which continues to thrive today in the PLAS (Programming Languages and Systems) group at Kent. Simon Thompson’s talk celebrated Turner’s remarkable contributions to programming language research and his enduring impact on the academic community.

The event also fostered a collaborative and inclusive atmosphere. Attendees—from students to senior researchers—had the opportunity to network, share ideas, and engage in stimulating discussions. The Canterbury campus provided a welcoming setting for this exchange of knowledge and expertise.

The success of this year’s Kent Concurrency Workshop and S-REPLS 15, with the support of VeTSS, highlights the vital role such events play in advancing programming languages and concurrency research. Organising the event was an immensely rewarding experience, and I am eager to see how the ideas shared here will contribute to future innovations and collaborations in the field.

By Marco Paviotti