On the 16th of March, Skills Matter organized the Third Functional Programming eXchange, an annual Functional Programming conference. A day of talks, open-space discussions and brainstorming on Functional Programming. Third speaker on the agenda was our own Erik Hesselink.
Erik spoke about the uses of and experiences with functional programming at Silk. Our backend uses Haskell to provide an API. It provides functionality from simple account creation to querying a custom graph database. Haskell’s types and abstraction power have enabled us to build complex functionality with very few errors. However, laziness and performance are tricky to understand and get under control.
Silk’s frontend is written in Javascript. With first-class functions, functional programming techniques can readily be used here. For example, we use reactive values to statically model the dependency between application state and the user interface. However, runtimes are not optimized for this, and performance in the browser can be limited.
View Erik’s talk here (46 minutes) or read about the Functional Programming Exchange 2012.
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