Karel Čížek: Grim hardware realities of functional programming
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On the first sight programmers - and especially of functional variety - are cool and decent members of society, who are proud of their job. Why not? The world is run by code and they make that code. In that situation it's not unreasonable to feel like a god.
But when they are alone in the middle of the night, they have to face the truth: Their creations are running on thin slabs of silicon and most of the time those masterful sculptures of transistors are idle, hungrily waiting to be fed by inefficient code. Programmers can hide behind abstractions and lambda calculus and other lies promising that everything will be all right. All they need to do is to believe, believe in Object, believe in Function, believe in Actor, believe in Referential Transparency and don't have to worry about reality, don't have to worry about violent, nasty and brutish world of hardware.
But maybe, just maybe, this is all wrong and we should study processors and understand architecture or modern computers, because it might allow us to write faster and vastly more efficient programs, that work with hardware, not against it.
In this talk, I will describe inner workings and idiosyncrasies of the modern hardware and then show how it relates to the functional programming. And I tell you, it won't be pretty.
Bio: Speaker's main preoccupations are embracing the Absurd, keeping cool in the face of everlasting horrors and PHP development.