View source for FOSDEM2025-devroom-proposal


= Devroom name: Declarative and Minimalistic Computing =

Declarative computing - for big ideas

= Devroom description =

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming Declarative programming] is a programming paradigm that expresses the logic of a
computation without describing its control flow. Many languages that
apply this style attempt to minimize side effects by describing what
the program must accomplish in terms of the problem domain, rather
than describe how to accomplish it as a sequence of the programming
language primitives. Declarative programming is the basis for
functional programming, logic programming and dataflow. At FOSDEM 2024
we organized the Declarative and Minimalistic Computing
devroom which was a great success. In past editions, this devroom has
received presentations from a varied number of language communities,
including Forth, Guile, Lua, Nim, Racket, Raku and Tcl as well as several
experimental projects that push minimalism in new directions. 

In this year's conference, we will encourage speakers to honor individuals who have inspired them and whose work is relevant to their presentations.

Minimalism means designing systems that use the least
hardware and software resources possible. In an era where personal
computer perfomance capabilities expanded by orders of magnitude and
mainstream software becomes more and more complex, minimalistic
programming languages try to remain simple, elegant and use are little
resources as possible. This year we will focus on declarative aspects
of programming to make systems simpler, more robust and more secure.

With the expansion of small hardware in phones, the internet of things
and embedded systems, free and open source software minimalism and
declarative programming is essential to providing secure systems.

Key organizers of this declarative/minimalistic languages dev room for
big ideas are members of the GNU projects for Lua, Mes, Guile, Gash and
Guix. We will invite people from many other projects who contribute to
improve today's systems taking declarative/minimalistic approaches.

Examples of the types of talks we envisage for this dev room are

# Declarative Mobile/embedded software development
# Distributed applications using Flow-Based Programming
# Hacking free software with declarative GNU Guix
# GNU Mes bootstrapping full free software systems from source
# Programming for open hardware architectures
# Building domain specific languages (DSLs)
# DSLs for logic programming
# Minimalistic virtual machines and OS

= Related URLs =

  - MES and bootstrappable https://www.gnu.org/software/mes and http://bootstrappable.org
  - Zig programming language https://ziglang.org/
  - D as a better C https://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/23/d-as-a-better-c/
  - GNU Guile https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/
  - Scheme http://community.schemewiki.org/
  - Racket https://racket-lang.org/
  - Minikanren http://minikanren.org/
  - Uxn https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxn.html
  - Interim OS http://dump.mntmn.com/interim-paper/
  - Minimalistic and alternative OS Design https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/composability-homogeneity-and-language-based-systems-fb00e2c2458

= Why should FOSDEM accept this proposal? =

Declarative programming and minimalism matters. Declarative
programming allows for software that can more easily be reasoned about
and is therefore more robust and secure. Minimalism allows for smaller
systems that take less resources and consume less energy. More
importantly, free and open source declarative software and minimalism
allows for secure systems that are easy to understand. We believe
these topics are educational and bring back the fun of the early days
of computing where people learn to understand systems from the ground
up. Speakers will be asked to accentuate the educational side of their
projects.

We have been organizing devrooms for some time. We expanded themes by
adding minimalistic and experimental languages. Our devrooms have been
very popular. We focus on a more theoretical level of software
engineering inspired by the current developments in functional
programming, logic programming and dataflow.  FOSDEM gives our
communities a great impulse by getting developers together. This
devroom will be a great opportunity to attract new people, new ideas
from different backgrounds, as well as gather everyone familiar with
the projects to develop new free Software and improve existing
projects in one (in person or virtual) place.

= Devroom organizers =

  - Pjotr Prins (pjotr.public445@thebird.nl)
  - Manolis Ragkousis (manolis837@gmail.com)
  - Bonface Munyoki (me@bonfacemunyoki.com)
  - Jonathan McHugh indieterminacy@libre.brussels)
  - Arun Isaac (arunisaac@systemreboot.net)
  - Amirouche Boubekki (amirouche.boubekki@gmail.com)
  - Hisham Muhammad (hisham@gobolinux.org) 
  - Ludovic Courtès (ludo@gnu.org) - GNU Guile, GNU Guix
  - Jan Nieuwenhuizen (janneke@gnu.org) - GNU Mes project leader
  - Ricardo Wurmus (ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de)
  - Alex Sassmannshausen (alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com)
  - William Byrd (webyrd@gmail.com)
  - Oliver Propst (oliver.propst@gmail.com)
  - Julien Lepiller (julien@lepiller.eu)