Making the most of Lambdas - Advanced Functional Programming Concepts for any language

Speaker:

Location:

Seacliff D

Abstract:

As evidenced by the inclusion of lambdas a wide array of programming languages such as PHP, Mathematica, JavaScript, Java 8, Scala, Clojure, C#, Visual Basic, Objective-C, ... functional languages represent the leading edge of programming language design. In particular the pure and lazy functional language Haskell provides Petri dish-like setting in which new programming concepts are introduced and studied.

In this tutorial we will build upon the highly popular Channel 9 Functional Programming Lectures (http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html) and focus on a number of more advanced topics in fundamentalist functional programming such as cata-, ana-, hylo- and other morphisms, monads, thinking with types, juggling with code, and show how these skills can be applied in making you a better hacker no matter what language you use in your day job.

Erik Meijer

Erik Meijer is a Dutch computer scientist and entrepreneur. From 2000 to early 2013 he was a software architect for Microsoft where he headed the Cloud Programmability Team. He then founded Applied Duality Inc. in 2013. Before that, he was an associate professor at Utrecht University. He received his Ph.D from Nijmegen University in 1992. Meijer's research has included the areas of functional programming (particularly Haskell) compiler implementation, parsing, programming language design, XML, and foreign function interfaces. His work at Microsoft included C#, Visual Basic, LINQ, Volta, and the Reactive programming framework (Reactive Extensions) for .NET. In 2009, he was the recipient of the Microsoft Outstanding Technical Leadership Award and in 2007 the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award as a member of the C# team. Meijer lived in the Netherlands Antilles until the age 14 when his father retired from his current job and the family moved back to the Netherlands. In 2011 Erik Meijer was appointed part-time professor of Cloud Programming within the Software Engineering Research Group at Delft University of Technology. He is also member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board.