14 January
4pm, LT308 Huxley
| Title: | Age is not an Int |
|---|---|
| Abstract: | For those of us who have decided to use statically-typed programming languages, it should be obvious that we are sold on the importance of using types to help us ensure the programs we write are correct ones. Years of observations, however, have demonstrated that there has been a widespread failure to make full use of types and a glut of unmaintainable, obfuscated programs have been the inevitable result. This talk will attempt to persuade you of the importance of using types, how the most successful programming language of recent history has failed us (and continues to do so) and what to do about that. We will see how a language with a half-decent type system (including dependent types, higher-kinded types and variance) allows us to construct programs whose configuration, logging, state, error handling and IO can be encoded in a single type enabling re-use, testing and raised levels of background happiness. |
| Speaker Details: | Chris Marshall Chris, appearing as @oxbow_lakes on StackOverflow.com (and twitter) has been programming in the scala language at GSA for over 6 years, following a fraught ten year relationship with Java. A mathematician by training, he's spent 17 years in financial IT, the last eight and a half of which have been at GSA where he works in the CORE technology team. Chris has given several talks on scala and the scalaz functional-programming library as part of the London Scala eXchange, Functional programming eXchange and the Scala Lift-off. He can often be found jabbering on the subject of monad transformer stacks to anyone who is foolish enough to listen. |
