Double bill: tagless final, monad transformers

After sinking into obscurity over a year ago, the functional Brighton meet-up is making a comeback to educate and inspire like-minded folk in the dark art of functional programming. Come along to sink your teeth into some cutting edge topics in FP (and some tasty pizza too!). Watch presentations from passionate speakers and discuss your thoughts in an open, friendly environment.

Their first session features two presentations:

Firstly, under the guidance of Peter Perháč, we will look into monad transformers (MT); what they are, why and how to use them. Since Monad type class is not part of the Scala standard library, we will be leaning on abstractions and using data types from the Typelevel Cats library. The aim of this session is to get everyone acquainted with the idea of monad transformers (and with Cats).

We will explore different ways they can be used to make your code neater and help with everyday tasks. Look at using MTs in for-comprehensions and covering a couple of lifting techniques to achieve this. We'll also explore using MTs outside of for-comprehensions, getting familiar with methods like `subflatMap`, `semiflatMap`, etc.

Understanding monads and type classes is not a prerequisite for this session (though having a rough idea what they are will help).

Next up, Doug Clinton will be talking about Finally Tagless in Scala, a technique for abstracting out effects, showing how this can make it easier to test your code and how it impacts the overall architecture of an application.

We're at The Skiff, entrance in Blackman Street. Doors open 19:00 for a 19:30 start.