Erik Meijer

Fundamentalist Functional Programming

Abstract: In 1984, John Hughes wrote a seminal paper titled, “Why Functional Programming Matters,” in which he eloquently explained the value of pure and lazy functional programming. Due to the increasing importance of the Web and the advent of many-core machines, in the quarter of a century since the paper was written, the problems associated with imperative languages and their side effects have become increasingly evident.

This talk argues that fundamentalist functional programming-that is, radically eliminating all side effects from programming languages, including strict evaluation-is what it takes to conquer the concurrency and parallelism dragon. Programmers must embrace pure, lazy functional programming “all the way”-with all effects apparent in the type system of the host language using monads.

Bio: Erik Meijer is a Dutch computer scientist and entrepreneur. From 2000 to early 2013 he was a software architect for Microsoft where he headed the Cloud Programmability Team. [1] He then founded Applied Duality Inc.[2] in 2013. Before that, he was an associate professor at Utrecht University. He received his Ph.D from Nijmegen University in 1992. (Source: Wikipedia)