[Pdx-pm] Highly Functional Programming - July meeting this Thursday

[Eric Wilhelm]

  Thursday, July 10 6:53pm -- Free Geek 1731 SE 10th

Hi All,

I will be presenting a preview of my upcoming OSCON talk:

Functional programming is very pure and elegant when nothing can change, 
and the computer can reason about your code for you -- in theory. 
Reality is messier, but Perl and other high-level languages support pure 
functions as a subset of the procedural and OO paradigms, so why don't 
we use them more? Functional techniques are good problem solving tools, 
useful for event-driven programs, and can be mixed into traditional OO 
and procedural codebases for better code reuse and testability.

In this talk, we'll look at some benefits of purely functional 
programming from a pragmatic and procedural viewpoint. There will be 
absolutely no mention of monads because we will just ride our lambdas 
through the mud and get it done. We'll see how good programming 
practices tend to suggest stateless and functional approaches. We'll 
examine techniques for refactoring which separate functions from state 
changes and allow you to better test and reason about your code. 
Finally, we'll look at language interpreters and discuss how technology 
might be able to help get even more benefits out of highly functional 
programming approaches.

As always, meet us at the Lucky Lab for some beer and good company 
following the meeting.

  http://calagator.org/events/1250466612

Thanks,
Eric