Mini-meetup: The expression problem and its solutions

This talk by Daniel will shed light on a problem that everyone of us has encountered in some form: the expression problem.

The expression problem deals with the question of how data types and their associated operation can be kept open for later extension in the context of statically typed languages.
Many different strategies have been described to solve or circumvent this issue both on an architectural and language level. Finally-Tagless and object algebras are the first complete solutions which do not require any advanced language features in order solve this problem. In this talk Daniel will introduce the expression problem itself and show that it can be observed nearly everywhere in programming. Finally, he will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using Finally-Tagless and object algebras and how to deal with their shortcomings.

This talk is not a tutorial for using tagless final or object algebras in scala. Instead it is meant as an (admittedly theoretical) explanation why those concepts are useful.

Schedule:

• ~ 7 pm Start of the talk
• ~ 8 pm Open discussions + food & beverages