Meetup: Why Functional Programming Matters
Next week we welcome the meetup group Papers We Love Utrecht at bol.com. Thursday, the 29th of June, the program will start at 6.30 PM.
What to expect:
How should we structure complex and large software programs? How can we ensure they are modular, easy to maintain and reason about? Functional programming provides higher order functions and lazy evaluation. How can these features be used to write programs with these nice properties?
For this edition of Papers We Love, we are lucky to have João Pizani discuss classic paper by John Hugues: "Why Functional Programming Matters".
Link to paper: https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf
Schedule
18:30 - Welcome with food and drinks19:00 - Opening19:10 - Talk20:00 - Announcements21:00 - Closing
Talk Abstract
John Hugues' paper "Why Functional Programming Matters" was not the first FP (Functional Programming) paper that I read, but it was the one which convinced me to go on and study FP for many years. This paper shows how FP can be not only efficient, productive and formal, but also very beautiful. With an easy-to-understand style, John uses two examples in this paper to show how complex programs can be written in a VERY elegant and maintainable way. I hope to go together with you through these examples, and share the excitement I had when I first read this landmark paper.
Speaker: João Pizani
João Pizani did a B.Sc in Computer Science back in Brazil, and during this period loved low-level tinkering with electronics, operating systems and networking (some of this tinkering still persists as lunch chats and hobbies). Also during his bachelor, in 2009, he heard for the first time of this thing called "Haskell" and started to write lots of class projects in it. After reading "Why Functional Programming Matters" he has "Seen The Light™", and decided to study FP in the "Software Technology" master's program in Utrecht University. Now he is doing Ph.D research also in Utrecht, on the formal description and verification of digital circuits. This topic nicely allows him to combine his two passions: low-level hacking and high-level reasoning.