Recently (not really actually, 2 weeks had passed already) I've attended FPCONF conference - the first functional programming conference in Russia. Below I want to note my impressions on this event.
About me personally - I have 8 years of hands-on programming experience, primarily in C#, a little bit of Scala and Haskell. I can't call myself truely and deeply functional person because of the hard object-oriented legacy that lies on my shoulders :) However, I believe that fusion of the OOP and FP is a near future (or even a present, if we take a look at Scala) of programming languages.
The conference itself wasn't quite big - 17 speakers and around 200 attendees. As for the languages - the vast majority of topics were related to Haskell, Scala and Clojure. Also there were topics on Erlang and even F# (about the evolution of Type Providers).
I guess the most memorable presentation was a keynote from Edward Kmett (Chairman of the Haskell Core Libraries Committee). As it turned out he forgot his slides, so the whole presentation was done with bare github page opened in browser and a vi editor :)
I think the most important things this conference revealed to me are follows:
About me personally - I have 8 years of hands-on programming experience, primarily in C#, a little bit of Scala and Haskell. I can't call myself truely and deeply functional person because of the hard object-oriented legacy that lies on my shoulders :) However, I believe that fusion of the OOP and FP is a near future (or even a present, if we take a look at Scala) of programming languages.
The conference itself wasn't quite big - 17 speakers and around 200 attendees. As for the languages - the vast majority of topics were related to Haskell, Scala and Clojure. Also there were topics on Erlang and even F# (about the evolution of Type Providers).
I guess the most memorable presentation was a keynote from Edward Kmett (Chairman of the Haskell Core Libraries Committee). As it turned out he forgot his slides, so the whole presentation was done with bare github page opened in browser and a vi editor :)
I think the most important things this conference revealed to me are follows:
- Functional programming community in Russia is relatively small, comparing to other communities such as .NET or Java.
- Scala is becoming more and more popular among the Java community despite its much higher (comparing to Java) entry level.
- Metaprogramming is a powerful technic that should be considered to be used more often in a commercial projects (by the way, "Metaprogramming Ruby" by Paolo Perrotta is a great book to read on a subject). I'm glad that this concept is taking its rightful place in modern languages (Macros in Scala, Type Providers in F#, Reflection and code generation in C#, etc.) However, it has a huge downside - it makes it easy to shoot yourself in a foot, so you should use it carefully.
- Since the third version, F# became very attractive to write really cool things on it. My personal plan is to learn some F# this year. It may even help me to improve some parts of project that I'm working on currently.
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