Talks
Anyone who has touched a functional programming tutorial would agree: Learning functional programming is hard.
So why do we bother? Why do functional programmers spend so much time understanding monads, why do we fight for strange languages and weird techniques? What is it that drives us and is there really anything valuable here?
This talk is specifically aimed at beginners. If you're curious about functional programming, if you don't know where to start, if you've tried to learn functional programming before and found it confusing, difficult or demotivating then this talk is for you.
Now for some expectation setting: This talk is not going to cover anything in depth. I'm not going to explain monads or functors. I'm not going to talk about the elgence of type classes. I'm not going to write valid syntax for most of the examples. I'm not even going to try and convince you that functional programming is a better paradigm.
Instead I'll show you what the world looks like from a functional programmer's eyes. At the end of the talk you won't have learned any new techniques but you will understand the motivation behind the tools we use.
It's time to ask the really hard questions: Why are Monads hard?
No topic has inspired so much confusion, fear and anger as the humble Monad. Indeed, upon learning of the truth they are known to warp the mind of the beholder, preventing their secrets from spreading further!
But why! Why are they so hard? Functor and Applicative don't inspire so much panic, so why Monad?
I have a theory: Monads are especially difficult to learn because the word "Monad" can refer to a huge number of different concepts and ways of thinking.
So instead of trying to explain what a Monad is, I'm going to talk about all the things someone could be talking about when they say "Monad".
This is the part of the synopsis where I lower your expectations:
- This talk will not teach you how to use Monads. But it might give you a tiny bit more insight, no promises!
- This talk will use a mixture of languages and syntax but most of the examples probably won't compile
This talk is aimed at Beginners, Advanced FP Folk and anyone who's wondering What's the hype with this Monad thing?