Main Hall 06: Why is Functional Programming so hard?

Everything is easy - when you know how.
It's learning how that is difficult!
In this presentation, Mark Cheeseman looks at some of the common approaches and problems encountered in helping programmers learn functional programming.
He will run through the progression he typically walks developers through in learning functional programming, examining what is significant at each step along the way. Examples will be primarily drawn from Typescript, incorporating the fp-ts library.
The talk concludes with some observations on the actual usage of services in a company using functional programming on an occasional basis and the pros and cons of doing so. Finally, he will answer the question, "is it worth it?" But you already know the answer to that, don't you? It depends! :)
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Mark is a Staff Engineer at SEEK working on a team that manages services in the BFF part of the seek.com.au system. His interests include GraphQL, functional programming, and how to manage the ongoing process of developing services in increasingly complex and higher-volume systems.

[@statebased]

Types make FP harder. Better start "soft", with Python, frozen data classes and much __call__ .

[@akim1995]

I agree, but I'd suggest switching Python or JavaScript to Clojure. Functional programming (FP) isn't just about the type system.

[@statebased]

I like Jax's numerical abilities and therefore why FP with Python.