Uniting Church and State - FP and OO Together

Explore a powerful technique for combining functional programming (FP) and object-oriented (OO) paradigms in this 38-minute conference talk from Scala Days Copenhagen 2017. Dive into Church encoding, an underappreciated tool that allows developers to retain the simple semantics of FP code while achieving performance levels typically associated with OO systems. Learn how this approach was successfully applied to create a high-performance time series analysis engine for multi-TB datasets, providing a streaming API accessible to data scientists familiar with Spark. Discover how Church encoding, also known as refunctionalisation, bridges the gap between classic FP pull-based systems and OO push-based systems, offering both simplicity and speed. Gain insights into solving real-world performance challenges while maintaining the benefits of functional programming principles.

Uniting Church and State: FP and OO Together by Noel Welsh