Functional programming languages can be intimidating especially with all the different terminology!
Co-Founder of Real Kinetic, Beau Lyddon at LambdaConf 2018 helped us to combat this fear by showing how we can learn all about functional programming without having to understand all the terms.
Don't Worry About Monads
Many of us have struggled to pick up functional languages. We've been scared off by the terminology: monads, monoids, functors. My goal is to show those afraid to jump in that there is room in the functional world for all of us, no matter your background or skills. I will show how you can not only learn functional languages without understanding those scary terms but that you can even ship production code.
Like many of you, I approached functional programming from an imperative background without much math education. I found that sitting down with the goal of understanding monads got me me nowhere. It wasn't until I started building applications that I started making progress.
We will start with Elm and show how you can get up and running with a project even more quickly than you can with many of the popular imperative languages. I'll show how those coming from Python, Ruby, and JavaScript can feel right at home with Elm. Once we are comfortable with the basics of the syntax, we'll then walk through the Elm architecture and how structuring functional systems are often simpler than it is in object-oriented systems.
To finish, we'll quickly show how, all along, we were using monads, monoids, and functors without once using the terms. I'll leave you with quick examples of how Elm can lead you right into strongly-typed functional languages such as Haskell and PureScript.
This talk was given by Beau Lyddon at LambdaConf 2018.