Guest
Functional programming is getting a lot of attention and with it comes a lot of confusion. What is functional programming all about? The answer is not recursion, or currying, or pattern matching. It's not about monads or functors. So, if those concepts sound alien to you, fear not. Those are just design patterns and language features that make it easier to program in a functional way. You do not have to learn Haskell to write functional code. What differentiates functional code from a non-functional code is not the language it is written in, it's the fact that it's stateless - there are no side-effects. This talk will explore the concept of state and side-effects a bit further and explains why writing stateless code is becoming more and more important. Next to that, expect to get some pointers on how to get started with functional programming right away, using a non-functional language, like Python. Slides: About An
