Rúnar is an independent software developer, co-author of “Functional Programming in Scala” (Manning, 2013), and a functional programming extremist. He's a software engineer in Boston, an author of a book, Functional Programming in Scala, and a speaker on topics in functional programming.
Rúnar received his education in computer programming and electrical engineering at the Reykjavík Technical College in Iceland. In the intervening decades he has done diverse programming work, including antivirus research, software for agriculture and animal breeding, real estate, IT, finance, and genomics. Rúnar has worked with many programming languages including Pascal, C, Java, Haskell, Scala, and Ruby, and made some of his own.
In this introductory-level talk, we will look at what functional programming really is, what its actual benefits are, and ultimately why that matters.