Gilad Bracha

Co-author of Java, Creator of Newspeak

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a software engineer at Google where he works on Dart. Previously, he was a VP at SAP Labs, a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, and a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

Deconstructing Functional Programming
Track: (Post)Functional

Location:
Grand Ballroom A

Abstract:
Functional programming (FP) embodies two major ideas of great value: the elimination of side effects and the use of first class functions. However, many other ideas are strongly associated with functional programming: laziness, Hindley-Milner style types, ML modules, monads, currying, pattern matching. In this talk we'll focus on the negative aspects of some of these ideas and try to separate the good parts of FP from its unnecessary cultural baggage.

Survivors of the talk will be better positioned to distinguish FP hype from reality and to apply key ideas of FP in non-FP languages.