LFCS Seminar Tuesday 5th August: Michael Sperber

Title:  Functional Programming - What is it Good For?

Abstract:

Judging from papers and books on functional programming (FP), FP excels as a tool for writing short programs. But is it equally good for programming in the large and in the long term? Large FP codebases certainly exist, and their developers swear by FP. Yet, the big leap into the software architecture mainstream is yet to come, despite over 40 years (50? 65?) of experience, countless papers and plenty of evangelism. One reason is that there is little comprehensive documentation of how and why FP in the large works. The talk will report on more than decade of industrial projects using functional programming at Active Group - the techniques that we applied, why they work, and what the FP community still needs to do to succeed at scale.   We'll touch on architecture, coupling, data modeling, the development lifecycle, and how to structure functional-programming teams for large projects.

Bio: Mike Sperber is CEO of Active Group, a software consultancy in Tübingen, Germany that develops software for client projects using functional programming. He has a long history of publishing on functional programming, including many research papers, and was the project editor for the R6RS standard for the Scheme programming language. He has also developed an introductory course in programming in use at several German universities, based on the PLT group's Program by Design approach. He also co-authored iSAQB Advancedd curricula on Functional Software Architecture, Domain-Specific Languages and Formal Methods.