Recursion and How to Avoid It

In functional languages, we are generally encouraged to use recursion rather than iteration (loops). Greg Pfeil, the author of several libraries and tools focused on recursion, is going to explain why that is, what the tradeoffs are, and then incrementally move toward a third option – recursion schemes.

We’ll also see how we can introduce recursive computation in languages that don’t support it (i.e., where functions aren’t allowed to call themselves, or otherwise create cycles) and why we might want to use this same approach even in languages that do support recursion.

Finally, we’ll learn how we can disable support for (some) recursion in at least GHC and Scala and how that can provide helpful guard rails for our code.

This talk is suitable for all programmers.

All are welcome. We abide by the Contributor Covenant.

There will be non-alcoholic beverages (courtesy H&H) and pizza, as well as time to socialize and discuss the Haskell & FP world in general.

If you have any projects or topics you’d like to share at a future event, please message the organizers. Introductory-level talks are particularly encouraged.