Do you feel like you need to clarify what ADTs are?
Benefit from this talk by Nicolas Rinaudo at FP in the City Conference where you'll end it with a solid intuition of when and how to use them.
Far more than you've ever wanted to know about ADTs
Algebraic Data Types are a very simple, yet very powerful tool to use when designing systems. Most developers are familiar with them, or subsets of what we call ADTs, even if they are not aware of them - enumerations, for example, or records.
The purpose of this talk is to clarify what ADTs are, what properties they have and how these properties can be used to express strong invariants at the data level - such as making illegal states or state transitions impossible to represent.
It also explores the generalised form of ADTs - GADTs - and attempts to lift some of the confusion that surrounds them in the Scala community.
We will also (lightly) tackle the theory behind them and try to understand where the “algebraic” part of the name comes from.
By the end of the talk, attendants should have a solid intuition of when and how to use them, and be able to bring them to use in their own projects directly.