InfoQ Homepage Presentations Panel: The Challenges of Using Functional Languages
Panel: The Challenges of Using Functional Languages
Summary
Panelists discuss which issues have an impact on the adoption of functional languages, hear how our speakers have addressed these issues and of course we'll have time for a Q&A.
Bio
Jafar Husain is Cross-Team UI Technical Lead at Netflix. Logan Linn is a software engineer at Prismatic. Marius Eriksen is a Principal Engineer in Twitter's systems infrastructure group. Kelsey Gilmore-Innis is a back-end engineer at PagerDuty. Stew O'Connor is a Senior Software Engineer at Verizon. Werner Schuster: InfoQ Editor Functional Programming, QCon PC, Wolfram.
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Community comments
Interesting... a few thoughts...
by Faisal Waris,
Interesting... a few thoughts...
by Faisal Waris,
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Dynamically typed and statically typed functional programming styles are very different.
In any LISP based language you can emit and evaluate code more or less as matter of routine. This requires a very different way of thinking.
For statically typed functional language you do need a bit of Category Theory (I am still learning). IMO a practical, statically-typed functional language today should have (beyond just lambdas):
- Function types and first class functions
- Good support for generics (plus non-OO need higher types / first class modules)
- Support for currying / partial application
- Syntax support for Monads
- Operator overloading
- Pattern matching
- Meta programming support (quotations / macros)