Pedro Gómez

Becoming a functional programmer thanks to Lambda World

Functional programming is a coding style where the structure and elements of computer programs are treated as the evaluation of pure functions avoiding changing-state, mutable data, and many different side effects. Describing the paradigm or the design style from the theory point of view could be easy, but what about using it in production? What about writing open source code using this paradigm? What about stop using OOP, favoring composition over inheritance from our code, mutability, and start thinking in a declarative way?

Functional programming is just one of the programming paradigms we can use to develop software. Thanks to frameworks such as Apache Spark, Play Framework or Apache Kafka it's becoming popular still, it's not so easy to adopt for a classic OOP developer.

Karumi developers have been using functional programming recently for different side projects and we'd like to recommend you a functional programming event which will help you to improve your development skills. This is Lambda World. The largest functional programming event in the country carefully crafted for you by 47 Degrees and the Scala and Java communities of Spain. Located in Cádiz, one of the most beautiful cities in Spain, this third edition of Lambda World will be full of workshops, hands-on experience, hacking, and debugging to learn your favorite functional languages. Checkout the last edition talks!

The whole Karumi team attended to the first two editions and the knowledge obtained from this event is astonishing. Here you have a list of topics you can review during this event:

  • Review different functional programming languages such as Haskell, Clojure, F# or Scala.
  • Learn about basic concepts such as functions as first class citiziens, the usage of type classes or what the functor is a monad.
  • Know functional programming patterns such as free monads or tagless-final.
  • Learn how lambda calculus or category theory influences how functional programmers code today.
  • Introduction to new mind blowing languages such as Idris.
  • How to use big data frameworks such as Spark or how to model your software using events and the producers/consumers Kafka model.

Here you can find a YouTube list with all the talks recorded during the past edition.

Topics are awesome but speakers are even better. Last year we had Philip Wadler (aka Lambda Man), one of the main contributors to programming language design and type theory, as keynote speakers. This year there are some awesome speakers you can't miss already announced:

  • Rúnar Bjarnason: Author of Functional Programming in Scala, Independent software developer.
  • Eugenia Cheng: Author of Beyond Infinity & How to Bake Pi, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
  • Bartosz Milewski: President and Founder, Reliable Software.
  • Jeremy Gibbons: Professor of Computing, University of Oxford.

speakers

Last, but not least we need to talk about the organization and the venue. Placed in downtown Cádiz, we will have two tracks full of awesome talks organized by experienced community contributors where the comfort and the attendant's needs are always in mind.

Venue

If you are interested, you can already get your tickets here. See you there?

Pedro Gómez

I'm a software engineer focused on new technologies, open source, clean code, and testing. Right now I'm working as a Senior Software Engineer at Karumi, a little software development studio.