Biography

Bodil is a developer, frequent speaker and occasional teacher of web technology and the dark realm of Lisp. She is currently leading the web dev team at Arktekk. She is best known as the creator of the Catnip IDE, and for her contributions to the field of programming language theory, especially the Facial Hair Theory of Language Design. She holds a doctorate in Metaphysics from ULC, and her favourite pony is Rainbow Dash.

Lectures

Discussion panel: Functional Programming - radical thinking shift and step towards clearer and reliable software

The discussion panel aims at presenting views on the usefulness of functional programming on JVM and beyond, including F# on .Net (if there are people who could tackle the topic with care). We hope to gather people with different opinions, often contradictory, so they can lead to useful outcomes about pros and cons of using functional programming languages - Scala, Clojure as the main players - for current and future projects.

There are plenty of questions people ask themselves when they're faced with learning functional languages and the discussion panel should address some.

Amongst the questions that attendees should anticipate get answers to could be: Why should I consider functional programming languages for my projects? Should I mix and match Java with other languages? What are the most-suited use cases for functional languages? Where would be an introductory area for introducing a functional language in a project? What tools should I get familiar with to get up to speed with functional programming on JVM?

What Every Hipster Should Know About Functional Programming

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Different programming paradigms serve different purposes. Systems programmers prefer tools that are dumb, imperative and close to the metal. Enterprise programmers prefer tools which foster complexity, increasing billable hours and the client's dependency on the developer.

And, let me just come clean and admit it, functional programmers do it for that delicious feeling of superiority that comes from looking down your nose at the normals in their caves banging together for loops and mutable state to make fire.

Treat yourself to a crash course in the vocabulary of functional programming: higher order functions, combinators, the infinite opportunities to throw the word "monad" in the face of anyone who thinks an ironic moustache is enough to justify all that self-assured smugness these days. You'll never have to lose a programming argument again once you've learned where to casually toss terms like "applicative functor" and "Kleisli triple" into the conversation.

This is the War of the Hipsters. Arm yourself now, before it goes mainstream.