STUDY: How do you go about debugging functional programs?

Are you currently developing or maintaining a medium to large-sized
program written in a functional language, such as Haskell, F#, OCaml,
or Lisp? I'm a PhD student doing a study of functional programmers,
as part of
a research internship at Microsoft, and I would like the opportunity
to look over your shoulder while you do debugging or coding on your
project.

I'm looking for people with at least a year's experience doing
functional programming, and who are currently working on a real
project (i.e. for some purpose other than learning functional
programming). I'd simply come watch you work, and ask a few
questions along the way. You'd do whatever you would normally be
doing. If you're near Seattle or Portland, I'd come to your office
for a couple of hours. If you're not near Seattle or Portland, then
we'd set you up with LiveMeeting or some other remote screencast
software so I can watch you from here.

Obviously security concerns are an issue - I will not share any
proprietary information that I learn about while visiting you.

In exchange for your help, Microsoft will offer you your pick of free
software off its gratuity list (which has about 50 items, including
Visual Studio Professional, Word for Mac, XBOX 360 games) or any book
from MS Press.

We're doing this because expert functional programmers have not been
studied much. We plan to share our findings through academic
publications, to help tool developers create debugging tools that are
genuinely helpful in real-world settings.

I'm hoping to finish my observations by August 8th, so please contact
me immediately if you're interested!

Thank you,


Chris Bogart
425-538-3562
t-chribo@microsoft.com