Functional Programming is going through the same process of rethinking as Object Oriented Programming has passed already. FP today is not only something mystical, something barely applicable for day-to-day tasks, but rather a whole philosophy of building big, complex applications, with own tools, approaches and methodologies. We can see a lot of ideas about software design and architecture emerging from the FP community: talks, books, articles. We’re actively discussing Final Tagless, Free Monads, effect systems and other approaches, but it seems the theme not yet covered and we don’t know about possibilities we have.

In this talk, I’ll tell you about the power of Free Monads in building complex applications in Haskell and PureScript. These applications will be satisfying the requirements like maintainability, testability, simplicity. You’ll know how to create a safe concurrent application state, how to divide the application into layers and how to keep the code sane. In fact, you can do the same with Final Tagless or extensible effects, but the approach with hierarchical Free Monads has some specific properties making it the best tool to separate concerns and create a very interesting eDSLs with different semantics.

The talk is based on the ideas I’m describing in my book “Functional Design and Architecture”. I also gave several talks about this theme earlier (you can find all my talks here).

I’ve used these ideas to build software for different companies, including Juspay (Bengaluru), Restaumatic (Poland), Enecuum (Hong Kong). We’ve created several interesting technologies that were not possible to make without Free Monads. Some of them are open sourced.