Erlang: the Power of Functional Programming

Simon Thompson
Creator of Wrangler and co-author of Erlang Programming

Erlang is a concurrent language built on a functional foundation. In this talk I’ll look at ways of increasing your programming productivity using ideas from functional programming, as well as showing how Erlang can be a gateway to other functional programming languages and styles, including lazy programming and dependent types.

Slides
Video

Simon has been with functional programming through the good and bad times since the 1980s, has written books on Erlang, Haskell and dependent types, and is really pleased to see all the buzz around Erlang and other languages at the moment. One big focus at the moment is working on building tool support to help with code transformations: refactorings, code migration, API upgrade and so on. Another is to build tools that provide strong guarantees that the refactorings that they implement don’t change what does code, but only change how it does it. He also teaches: teaching Erlang to students at Kent is well established, leading to students taking Erlang-based internships and placements in growing numbers; he’s running an Erlang MOOC on FutureLearn for the first time this year, too.


GitHub: simonjohnthompson

Twitter: @thompson_si

Back to conference page