Flexibility Through Immutability
While functional programming has a lot of advantages, the more I worked on the paradigm, the more surprised I was at how much thinking in a functional manner made refactoring easier.
As happy as I am to sell people on Clojure, I realized that teams could benefit from adopting some functional programming ideas even on their current language. I decided to try a different approach, and gave a talk at the 2016 ITAKE Unconference in Bucharest, elaborating on the benefits of immutable data. I wanted to focus on how the functional paradigm has a value in-and-of-itself. A secondary goal was to provide some tips that teams who can’t yet pull away from C# or Java can put into effect to help.
You’ll find my screen recording, as well as the slides, below.
I recorded the audio with my MacBook Pro’s microphone, but have done my best to clean it up and enhance it during the questions. ITAKE also recorded the talk. I hope they’ll make their video available soon, and will link to it when it’s available.
I also have the notes that I originally wrote for the talk, so if you’re more interested in reading than watching a video, let me know and I’ll clean them up and post them.
Memo to self: don’t say “in a mutable manner“ when talking about immutability, particularly if you speak quickly.
Here are the talks and resources I mention:
- Clojure All The Way Down
- Immutable collections for .Net and Java
- re-frame, a pattern for writing single-page applications in ClojureScript, using React / Reagent
- King’s talk on Defold, which uses Clojure for a game development editor.
- The Bucharest Functional Programming group
- Clojure!
The slides are at SpeakerDeck:
Update: ITAKE has uploaded the talk video, you’ll find it below.
Published: 2016-06-01
