Back in the ’40s, Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane started developing an entire new branch of mathematics: Category Theory. This was 10 years after Lambda calculus and 10 years before Lisp. Mathematics offers a powerful and concise language; we can represent a lot of complexity with short equations like E=mc2.

This session will explore how programming can harness maths’ capacity for conciseness and expression, borrowing from Category Theory. We’ll discover algebraic data types that can impact the way we code tremendously. You’ll also learn about functors, monads, applicatives, semigroups and monoids and how they can be used in a PHP context.

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Iamabot at 15:18 on 27 Jan 2017

Gave you 1 thumbs up for every person who understood the talk. On a serious note, good speaker, fun slides

No question that the speaker knew the content, but I think a lot of work is needed to deliver that to the audience. The examples were way too abstract and you went too fast through the slides

Instead of showing a flurry of different concepts, I would recommend trying to approach this a bit more as a "story" that you tell the audience. Find a use case or a series of use-cases where you can build up from the most simple examples, to more complex ones. You did show examples but they were disconnected form each other: if you can create a sense of continuity and progress, it will come through to the audience as a more coherent "story" that they can follow.

Maybe there was a lot of content too: see if you can reduce the number of new concepts you teach to a manageable amount.

And finally: when using slides and showing code, don't use abbreviations for class names or variable names. E.g. the purpose of "ImmList" is much more clear to an inexperienced user if it's called "ImmutableList" every time it appears on slides. Or instead of $var0 you could call it "returnValue"? etc.

Matt Cockayne at 16:30 on 27 Jan 2017

Interesting talk, great to see someone promoting functional programming in PHP. Thankfully a basic knowledge of Scala helped me to understand the content that was delivered from an very engaging speaker.

I got the impression from the back of the room however, that some of the points & examples discussed were not clearly understood. This may be because there was a lot of content that was delivered very very quickly under the assumption that the majority of the audience has some understanding of some basic concepts in functional programming.

I would suggest a bit more of an introduction to some of the concepts in functional programming at the start of the talk... In my opinion this would make an excellent workshop/tutorial session

I loved how engaging the speaker was, passionate and fun. The problem is that there was no real life examples which made the topic harder to understand. This talk would be amazing if the ideas weren't so abstract. I would love to hear this talk again, rewritten to have a real project behind it possibly, a real story and a flow.

Still thank you for your cool engaging talk and I got inspired to look more into FUNKEEEEH. :D

as odd as it sounds, i think this talk needs more theory for people not familiar with functional programming. at the same time, a real world example would be good, as motivation why functional programming is relevant

Koen Cornelis at 14:26 on 28 Jan 2017

There was potential here, but sadly the presentation lacked structure and was far too fast and high-level.

Loved the talk contents, but it ended up being a bit rushed. I know that this is usually a bit hard to do, but I strongly suggest adding more real-world examples, considering the type of crowd.

Speaker has deep knowledge of the topic but he rushed through the presentation making some parts hard to follow. As someone already mentioned reorganizing the content and frame it in a story or use cases can help make the topic more accessible

Niels C at 15:54 on 29 Jan 2017

This talk was not what I expected, I missed some more introduction and context. Was very high level, didn't really understand the why of it all.

The presentation had a lot of interesting concepts but they where hard to follow due to the lack of context. Tip for next time. Start with a 10/15 minutes introduction of what you are going to talk about, why and what does is solve to get aligned with the audience. Also a short explanation for each of the topics in between (functors, monads, applicatives, semigroups and monoids) will help. I had the feeling that the biggest part of the audience didn't even understand what they where looking at.

For the rest. Good speaker and interesting topic!

Dries Vints at 22:51 on 29 Jan 2017

Was really nice to see what you're working on. Got inspired by your examples on how you used functional programming in PHP. Like others said: perhaps take your time more to explain things. Some people also left before they saw the code examples so perhaps try to show some examples earlier to keep them interested. The math behind it made the talk hard to follow but that should definitely not be a negative point. Perhaps it wasn't something for the general audience.

But besides that, nice talk. Always great to see you speak

Hans Dubois at 08:40 on 30 Jan 2017

Functional programming is a great topic, since this talk was the only one with that topic a lot attention was draw to non-experienced functional programmers like me. For me it was really hard to understand the subject.

I think the talk could use a short introduction on what problems there are and how the Phunkie repo solves these.

Speaker was great and passionate about the topic!

Mario Peeters at 07:53 on 2 Feb 2017

Too theoretical. Could not think of a use case for it. Might be better to first give examples of how it could be used to solve e problem we all know and go deeper from there.