This year I was very fortunate to be sponsored by Mantel Group to attend the Lambda Days conference in Krakow, Poland. Lambda Days is a conference that gravitates around all things Functional Programming — the declarative paradigm that allows for programs that are easier to reason about —, bringing together academics, professionals, industry specialists and enthusiasts of FP to share their knowledge and experiences.

Besides my curiosity and anticipation for the 2-day schedule, my biggest expectation coming to the conference was being able to network with other FP programmers and build an understanding of the scale of FP in the European market. Working in Australia, I feel the isolation and sometimes a delay in the adoption of FP concepts in software engineering, despite the tremendous effort and quality gains they can bring. Simple things like immutability, referential transparency, pure functions and stateless code lead to more correct and maintainable software. In the end, I was somewhat relieved to see that FP is growing in adoption but still a niche in Europe too, contraty to my impressions from all the repositories and online content authored in countries such as the Netherlands, Germany and Poland.

Because the conference is about a programming paradigm and does not focus on a specific technology, talk topics ranged vastly, which was an absolute delight for me. There were talks on Property-Based Testing (PBT), embedding a Domain Specific Language (DSL) in a host functional language using the Tagless Final style, a deep dive into Algebraic Data Types (ADTs), using the Y Combinator for recursion in any language, Information Flow Control (IFC), AI, discussions on how programmers think about code and what language features and testing techniques favour people with this or that neuro-diverse trait, among many others. I also heard about FP languages that are quite popular in the community, like Elm and Elixir, which I had never heard of before.

Below are the recordings of my 2 favourite talks in the conference, which were the opening and closing keynotes on the second day. The first is about recent research on Algebraic Effect Handlers by Research Scientist Ningning Xie, who starts by explaining the concepts of Algebraic Effects and Effect Handlers with interesting examples, and then goes on to propose a way of parallelizing computations with multiple handlers, offering a sample implementation in Haskell.

And the second is about the huge efforts of Planetary Computing Professor Anil Madhavapeddy to create a platform for crunching volumes of satellite data, so to inform policy makers about deforestation in order to conserve flora and fauna species. It was eye-opening to me realising that policy makers need not only explainable data but also data that can be comparable over the many decades of their collection.

I left the conference inspired to continue to learn FP, despite its generally niche status in the industry and usual steep learning curve. Functional techniques can be adopted slowly and incrementally in any software project and with most general-purpose programming languages really (of course, the more functional a language is, the less self-disciplined the programmer needs to be). After all, when it comes to solving problems, plural, complimentary approaches work best.

Tchau tchau, beautiful Krakow! See you next time!