Brian Beckman: Don't fear the Monad

Cross posted from msdn's channel 9.

Functional programming is increasing in popularity these days given the inherent problems with shared mutable state that is rife in the imperative world. As we march on to a world of multi and many-core chipsets, software engineering must evolve to better equip software engineers with the tools to exploit the vast power of multiple core processors as it won't come for free as it did in the recent past which was predictably based on Moore's law.

Of course, learning new ways to think about programming semantics and code patterns are not always straight forward. For example, most imperative programmers (which include most of us who build software for a living...) are somewhat perplexed by the notion of functions as first class data structures that can be combined to create powerful and composable systems. Languages like Haskell are pure functional languages and require programmers to think in a different way, often in a precise mathematical fashion where composing and chaining functions is "the Way".

Dr. Brian Beckman, a Channel 9 celebrity, astrophysicist and senior software engineer thought it would be a very good idea to address the complexity of monads in an easy to understand way: a technical conversation at the whiteboard with yours truly for Channel 9.

This video interview is the result of Brian's idea that he can in fact remove the fear of monads from anybody who pays attention to his explanation. Of course, you can't just cover monads in a vacuum (category theory is not really addressed here) so the context is functional programming (Brian covers functions and composable functional structures (function chains) and of course monoids and then monads).

Tune in. There's a lot to learn here and only Brian can make monads easy to understand for the rest of us!

• Category

  • Science & Technology

• License

  • Standard YouTube License