Post Functional

Functional Programming made it into mainstream and a wide variety of programmers are becoming familiar with concepts such as functions, persistent data structures, higher order functions (map, filter) or even fold and monads!Now that we are not any longer at the introductory phase, we can spend more time exploring how to take the power and the composability of the paradigm to the next level, using abstractions built on top of it, such as Functional Reactive Programming, or combining it with other paradigms, such as Logic Programming.

Day of week:

Thursday

Location:

Grand Ballroom - Salon D

Host:

Sadek Drobi

Presentations

Post Functional Unconference

11:30pm - 12:40pm

By: Floyd Marinescu

Meeting each other in the context of conversations we care about is why at QCon we are giving prime time to the unconference format; it creates a space for peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and creativity.

First we’ll father in a circle to be guided through creating an agenda using open space technology. Then there will be three three 20 minute time slots, each with 5 concurrent break out discussions that were designed by you.

Attendees often know more than the speakers! Bring your questions, ideas - be prepared to be surprised.
Fundamentalist Functional Programming

1:40pm - 2:30pm

By: Erik Meijer

In 1984, John Hughes wrote a seminal paper titled, 'Why Functional Programming Matters,' in which he eloquently explained the value of pure and lazy functional programming. Due to the increasing importance of the Web and the advent of many-core machines, in the quarter of a century since the paper was written, the problems associated with imperative languages and their side effects have become increasingly evident.

This talk argues that fundamentalist functional programming-that is, radically eliminating all side effects from programming languages, including strict evaluation-is what it takes to conquer the concurrency and parallelism dragon.

Programmers must embrace pure, lazy functional programming 'all the way'-with all effects apparent in the type system of the host language using monads.

A radical paradigm shift is the answer, but does that mean that all current programmers will be lost along the way? Fortunately not! By design, LINQ is based on monadic principles, and the success of LINQ proves that the world does not fear the monads.
Functional Programming For Web Programmers

10:20pm - 11:10pm

By: Sadek Drobi

Today's Web evolutions and the emergence of software as a service and Web services have led to new challenges in programming including distribution, scalability, management of various data formats (JSON, Html, ..), stream management (Comet, Server Sent Events, ...). A Web framework that considers these issues can significantly help developers capitalizing on the opportunities offered by Web while minimising potential risks.

Functional Programming has very interesting properties in terms of composition and declarativity. These properties are particularly instrumental for addressing challenges of Web programming. This talk will show how Functional Programming can be a big asset for making Web programming simpler and more robust. Using Play2 framework and Scala, I will use a sample app representative of real world Web development problems and challenges.
Purely functional I/O

5:10pm - 6:00pm

By: Runar Bjarnason

Pure functional programming allows us to write clean and modular code. But to write real programs, we have to interact with the outside world through I/O. Does this mean that we must resort to side-effects and abandon functional techniques? In this talk, we will see that the answer is exactly the contrary; side-effects make I/O harder, not easier.

We will discuss how to approach I/O from a purely functional perspective, explore the space of existing solutions, their benefits, and drawbacks.
The Code that Isn't There

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By: Scott Vokes

Data structures have a fundamental impact on the behavior, scalability, and adaptability of systems. The right data structures do much of your work for you, channeling your code's path of least resistance to your goals. The wrong ones can actively undermine your efforts or waste your time plugging holes left by unnecessary generality.

My talk will present some lesser-known data structures and show how aspects such as probability distributions and content-addressable storage can become tools to shape global system behavior.
The Functional Database

4:00pm - 4:50pm

By: Rich Hickey

Functional languages and paradigms are on the rise, but what about the database? Are we destined to forever have the database be a global shared mutable variable in our systems? In prior talks I've discussed an architecture that can provide the database as a value.

This talk will focus on the impact on the programming model once you have a functional database. What is it like to have the database as a value, local declarative query, speculative and time-travel powers, databases as arguments etc?

The talk will use Datomic as an example, but the principles and benefits will apply to any system that can provide immutable, recoverable bases.