Here at Clever Cloud, we're enthusiastic users of functional programming. It helps us a lot when it comes to have clean and maintainable code.
That's why we were delighted to fly to Bologna for the LambdaCon, to meet the Italian FP community as well as some twitter friends.
After a stop at Yoox offices where Quentin and I got the opportunity to have a chat with developers and the other speakers, it was time for the actual conference.
Fun with Categories
Many interesting functional programming concepts come directly from a branch of mathematics called Category Theory. The keynote speaker Bartosz Milewski went as far as saying that CT is the next revolution after mainstream FP adoption.
I was surprised to witness that "Kleisli Category" frightened people less than the dreaded M-word.
Category Theory is a vast field and can be intimidating for newcomers due to its extremely high level of abstraction, but the good news is that Bartosz is writing an introduction book aimed at developers.
Dissecting the rabbit
Since we use RabbitMQ a lot at Clever Cloud, we were happy to be able to attend Alvaro Videla's talk about RabbitMQ's internals, especially the actor hierarchy in place inside RabbitMQ.
Streams on top of Scala
We're big users of Scala and we deal with a lot of streamed data. That's why we've been using Scala's streaming libraries a lot, first with Play's iteratees, then with scalaz-streams and akka-streams.
Quentin did a nice round-up of what's available and the different use cases for streaming libs in Scala.
The slides are available on slideshare:
Streams on top of Scala
TDD as in Type-Directed Development
Even though I've started my career with dynamicallly typed languages, I've been very happy with static, expressive type systems these last years. In this talk I showed how to use types not only for safety, but as a very powerful design and communication tool.
You can have a look at the slides: TDD, as in Type-Directed Development
The european FP community is great
The people from CodersTug did a great job for their first conference. And it's great to see such forward-thinking events take place in Europe.
