Free monads from scratch

Abstract:
If purely functional programming avoids side-effects at all cost, then how do you write programs that are both pure and useful? How do you implement and test such programs without depending on the outside world?

Free monads allow us to structure complex programs while retaining purity, by decoupling their structure from their evaluation, but how do they work? After discussing the substitution model of evaluation, we will implement a naive Free monad in Haskell and in Scala, and discuss the real-world benefits of Free programs.

Most of this talk will be based on the paper "Data Types à la carte" written by Wouter SWIERSTRA, and it requires no previous experience with Free, but some experience with pure FP will be helpful.

Our Speaker:
Guillaume is passionate FP, and currently uses Scala to build a media management and streaming platform for the largest french pay-TV network

Conference mode: Zoom
we will publish the link some days before the event 😄