Functional Geekery Episode 105 - David Koontz

In this episode I talk with David Koontz. We talk his introduction to functional programming, F#, Haskell, community building, the LambdaCast, and more.

Our Guest, David Koontz

@dkoontz on Twitter
LambdaCast
@lambdacast on Twitter

Conference Announcements

The Strange Loop coming! It will be held in St. Louis, MO on September 28-30, 2017 at the Peabody Opera House. To submit your CfP, visit http://thestrangeloop.com/.

PWLConf 2017 will be taking place September 28th in St. Louis, MO, before Strange Loop. Visit http://pwlconf.org/ for more information and to stay updated on latest announcements.

Open FSharp will be taking place the 28th-29th of September in San Francisco, California. Visit openfsharp.org for more information and to register.

elm-conf is returning to St. Louis on September 28, 2017 for a day of learning, speaking, and connecting with the Elm language community. For more information and to register visit http://www.elm-conf.us/.

RacketCon is October 7th & 8th at the University of Washington, with keynote speakers Dan Friedman and Will Byrd. Visit http://con.racket-lang.org/ for more information and to register.

Celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of Clojure October the 12th – 14th at the Clojure/Conj in Baltimore, Maryland. Visit http://2017.clojure-conj.org/ for more information and to register.

LambdaWorld will be taking place in Cadiz, Spain on October 26th and 27th. For more information visit and to keep updated visit http://www.lambda.world/.

CodeMesh is coming up November 8th and 9th in London. For more information, and to keep an eye open for registration, visit http://www.codemesh.io/.

Moonconf will be taking place the 9th-11th of November. For more information visit http://moonconf.org/.

Clojure SYNC will be taking place in New Orleans on February 15th & 16th of 2018. For more information and to register visit: http://clojuresync.com/.

LambdaDays 2018 will be taking place February 22nd and 23rd in Kraków, Poland. For more information, and to register, visit http://www.lambdadays.org/.

If you have a conference related to functional programming, contact me, and I will be happy to announce it.

Announcements

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein,
Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can
find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@5:09]

About David
LambdaCast
How David got into software development
Starting in I.T. and moving towards game programming
First exposure to functional programming
Java
Python
Ruby
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
SICP Lecture Videos
Being unsure of how to apply functional programming ideas in game programming
“Everything was harder than it should be”
C#
F#
Real World Functional Programming
Haskell
Elm
What clicked when understanding _Real World Functional Programming_
LINQ
Trying to apply F# back to game development and day-to-day experience
Unity
Takeaways from trying to apply functional ideas back to C#
RobotArms
Pipeline operators and chaining
Moving from F# to Haskell
Haskell Programming from first principles
Learn You Some Haskell
Bouncing off Haskell and landing on Elm
Retrying Haskell after Elm
Trying to bring Elm to day-to-day work
Electron
GitKraken
Flow
TypeScript
PureScript
Bringing functional ideas back into the community
Lunch and learns
Meetups
Lessons learned from the lunch and learns vs meetups
Building something as a group in the monthly meetup
Elm as front-end and Haskell as back-end languages
Maybes vs Nulls
Not having anything to hold onto when talking about different concepts
Response about having different level of experience between hosts
Advice for sharing your learnings as you progress
“If you knew any more, you wouldn’t fill this important voice on the podcast”
Aiming for a small, concise, irreducible version of an explanation
Desert Code Camp
“If you thinking of doing [a functional programming podcast] I want to lie to you and tell you it’s no work at all”
Going to where people are
Audience breadth of JavaScript or C#
Idris
Advice for community outreach
“Realize nobody can be an expert in everything”
Haskell Pyramid
Resources for getting started in functional programming
Professor Frisby’s Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming
Ramda
Sanctuary
lodash
lodash/fp
FP Chat Slack community
Upcoming appearances
LambdaConf 2018
MoonConf
#lambdacast channel on FP Chat Slack community

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

Episode source