Things that are things, but not other things

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Talk Description

When learning things, I find it useful to have concrete example to help build an intuition.

The problem with this approach when explaining categorical abstractions is that a lot of types most developers are used to working with are Monads, and thus, all of the other things as well. Not having concrete examples of things that are, say, a Functor but not an Applicative, makes it harder to build an intuition of the difference between the two.

This talk is an experiment to see whether such examples are, in fact, useful. We will carefully build examples of common abstractions, see what makes them work, and attempt to break that. The hope is that understanding what needs to happen for a Functor to also be an Applicative will make it clearer what those two things are, what they share and, more importantly, what distinguishes them.

About our speaker - Nicolas Rinaudo

Nicolas writes code for JPMorgan, where we use Scala to make some very complicated things seem very simple.

After too many years as a Java programmer and a thankfully brief stint in marketing, Nicolas discovered Functional Programming through Scala and fell in love.

Since then, he's made it his mission to learn and explain the scary bits, by focusing on practical applications.

Nicolas is also the author and sole maintainer of a few useful OSS libraries, such as [kantan.csv](https://nrinaudo.github.io/kantan.csv/).

Agenda (Pacific Time)

• 10.00am - Welcome to SF Haskell by Salar Rahmanian
• 10.10am - Things that are things, but not other things By Nicolas Rinaudo

Resources

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