Programs as Values - Fun with Free Monads

This month at Indy FP we will be exploring a more advanced topic, Free Monads. Despite the crazy name Free Monads can actually be really practical and this talk will primarily focus on these practical aspects.

If, for example, you find that the more logging you add, the easier it is to debug your code in production, but the messier your code gets, Free Monads might offer an answer. Check out the full talk description below.

As always we will have Bazbeaux's pizza so please RSVP. Looking forward to seeing all of you.

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Programs as Values - Fun with Free Monads

In this talk we will explore Free Monads. Despite their scary name, Free Monads are not purely of academic interest, but can actually be useful in structuring real code. As our code grows in complexity, it is easy for our concerns to be mixed and our business logic to be unclear. Not only, does our code become messy, but it is riddled with side effects. Free Monads offer us a way out of this mess.

We will see how to use Free Monads to turn programs into values. Using the Free Monad, we can embed mini-programs into our application. These programs can then be interpreted in a variety of ways. This technique will allow us to separate our concerns. This gives us benefits similar to those that dependency injection is supposed to give us in OOP. Our code no longer relies on low level details, and our programs become more testable.