scalaz 8: A whole new game (John A. De Goes)

John A. De Goes introduces the design of Scalaz 8, focusing on its high-performance effect system and simplified type class hierarchy.

Scalaz 8 is the latest edition of the popular functional programming library for Scala. In this whirlwind tour, maintainer John A. De Goes discusses some of the hottest features of Scalaz 8, including all of the following: A fast, concurrent, and leak-free effect system, which has small, composable, and powerful primitives for building practical, real-world software; A non-linear type class hierarchy, which permits a more powerful hierarchy that infers well without devastating ambiguous implicit errors; Concise, beautiful, and efficient support for polymorphic values, which generalizes polymorphic functions; A powerful set of testing primitives to make easy work of testing functional code. In this tour, you’ll see how the design of Scalaz 8 was inspired by a desire to provide Scala developers with a principled, performant, and pragmatic library that never sacrifices the safety and equational reasoning properties of functional programming. You’ll see live code snippets that show you how solving complex real world problems is simpler, faster, safer, and more reasonable than in previous versions of Scalaz. And hopefully you’ll be inspired at just how far functional programming in Scala has come in the past decade. Bio: John A. De Goes has been functional programming for more than seven years at multiple companies, and has assembled world-renowned Scala and PureScript engineering teams, trained new developers in Scala and PureScript, and developed several successful open source FP projects. Known for his ability to take very complex concepts and explain them simply, John has taught numerous workshops and classes, including several highly-regarded workshops on Scala and PureScript. John moonlights as an instructor for LambdaConf, but his primary job is Chief Technology Officer of SlamData, an open source software company using pure functional programming to redefine analytics for modern data.