Passing the Buck: How Functional APIs are Easier on Everyone

Nathan Hamblen tells the story of Databinder Dispatch, a project to facilitate client-side HTTP communication in Scala. Dispatch wraps HttpClient to provide a functional interface to HTTP, for defining static interfaces to web APIs or to access any web resource directly.

We'll see how Dispatch's development has gotten around, over, and through the obstacles that face all mortal newcomers to functional programming. How much immutability is enough immutability? What are the flexibility advantages of higher-order functions in programming interfaces? Are there literally a million ways to write the same function literal? And finally, what the $#!$@ does ># mean? These questions and more will be answered Monday May 18.

Nathan writes the weblog Coderspiel about creative programming and, lately, mostly Scala.