Talks Evening - something for the Scala-curious

In March we welcome back Richard Dallaway, giving a preview of his QCon Session, Types working for you, not against you. We also have a different venue, with this month's meeting being held at the Brandwatch HQ.

Doors open at 7pm and we will have beer, soft drinks and pizza supplied by our sponsors Brandwatch. Talks will begin around 7:30pm. Developers of all levels are welcome to join us. Please do come along and say hello!

Richard lives and works in Brighton. He's a software developer, consultant, and contributor to Scala open source projects. He works for Underscore ( http://underscore.io ). That's the Scala consultancy which focuses on straightforward type-driven and functional aspects of Scala. He the co-author of Essential Slick ( http://underscore.io/books/essential-slick/ ),
and author of the Lift Cookbook ( http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920029151.do ). You can contact him on Twitter as @d6y ( https://twitter.com/d6y ), and via email at richard@underscore.io .

There's a perception that Scala is too complicated.
In part that may come from cryptic compiler errors and hard to understand types.
You might be left wondering: what's the point?
Why am I trying to hack my way through cruft?

1. There's a way of writing simple Scala. A few straightforward ideas can be used again and again.You're using the power and flexibility of Scala, but in a sane way. This might not be the Scala you've heard about.

2. The type system enables us to do more. It's not just about checking for errors. These ideas from the world of functional programming aren't about being "clever" (in the bad sense). It's about a useful set of tools for everyday coding. This might not be the functional programming you've heard about.

The talk is in three parts:

An example of what Scala looks like when using pattern matching over classes;How encoding an idea into types (using the "Combinable", or "monoid" if you prefer that kind of word); andUsing advanced features of Scala (compile-time sized checked collections) without having to complicate our own code.

If you're Scala-curious, or heard that Scala or functional programming with types is just insanely complicated, this is the talk for you.