Robin H. Hansen

Consultant @ Bekk, creator of Gren

Robin used to be a member of the Elm core team and has worked on the language's built-in data structures, as well as the time travelling debugger. Today, he's working on the Gren programming language, an Elm-inspired language that supports backend applications.

Outside of open source, he works as a consultant at Bekk, where he gets to work on the Elm code that powers the website of Vy, Norway's largest transport provider.

https://medium.com/@robinheggelundhansen

Designing a programming language for local reasoning and simple debugging

No matter how careful we are as developers, we've all written the occasional bug. We've all spent hours upon hours of debugging. We've all nearly cried when we figured out how simple the problem actually was.

However, some may also have realized that the number of bugs we write, and the time spent debugging them, greatly depends on the programming language we use.

In this talk we'll look into how the design of a programming language can reduce the number of bugs we write, and even reduce the hours of debugging needed to solve bugs once they occur.

By doing this, we can get an understanding of the trade-offs involved when designing a programming language, and maybe even get an appriciation of why certain programming constructs makes for more stable and correct software.

OBJECTIVES

The audience will learn how functional programming languages like Haskell and Elm lets them easier avoid bugs when coding, and why those languages are easier to debug than many other languages out there.

The audience will also get a glimpse into what it's like to think as a language designer, and all the trade-offs one has to make.

AUDIENCE

People interested in functional programming in general, and especially people interested in functional languages and functional language design.

Slides
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