Functional programming

Aug 11, 2026

The Past, Present & Future of Programming Languages • Kevlin Henney • YOW! 2025

Kevlin Henney explores the slow but profound evolution of programming languages, revealing how many 'new' features are decades-old concepts. He analyzes language popularity rankings, highlighting the dominance of 20th-century languages and the impact of the "von Neumann bottleneck." The talk delves into historical innovations from Fortran to Algol, coroutines to functional programming, and concludes by examining how Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming clients of existing languages, further entrenching the mainstream rather than causing radical change, often due to their training data favoring established codebases.

Feb 24, 2026

Effect Oriented Programming • Bill Frasure, Bruce Eckel, James Ward & Andrew Harmel-Law

Authors Bill Frasure, Bruce Eckel, and James Ward discuss the core concepts of Effect-Oriented Programming, explaining how effects are composable operations that encapsulate side effects and defer execution. They highlight how effect systems use compiler-checked types to manage unpredictability, improve testability, and make functional programming concepts accessible without intimidating jargon.

Jan 22, 2026

Effect Oriented Programming • Bill Frasure, Bruce Eckel, James Ward & Andrew Harmel-Law • GOTO 2026

Authors Bill Frasure, Bruce Eckel, and James Ward discuss the core concepts of Effect-Oriented Programming. They explain how effects are composable operations that encapsulate side effects and defer execution, allowing developers to manage unpredictability with compiler-checked types. The conversation covers ZIO, the expansion of effect systems into languages like TypeScript and Kotlin, and their unique, constraint-driven writing process.

Nov 21, 2025

How to Get People Excited about Functional Programming • Russ Olsen & James Lewis

In this interview from GOTO Copenhagen 2024, author Russ Olsen and software architect James Lewis dive deep into the philosophy and practice of functional programming, using Clojure and Lisp as key examples. They discuss effective strategies for learning and teaching complex technical concepts, the cultural nuances of programming communities, and the inspirational power of large-scale engineering achievements like the Apollo moon landings.

Oct 24, 2025

Elm & Open Source: What's Next? • Evan Czaplicki & Kris Jenkins

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the sustainability challenges of open-source that led to Elm's development pause, his new work on a full-stack typed functional language, and his thoughts on improving developer experience to make functional programming more accessible.

Aug 18, 2025

Lets See What We Can do! with F# Computation Expressions • Andrew Browne • YOW! 2015

Andrew Browne demystifies F# Computation Expressions, showing how this powerful feature is a simple syntactic transformation. He demonstrates building custom expressions for handling optional values (maybe), asynchronous sequences, and even creating a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) with Free Monads for robust testing.