What do you do when your quest for power leads you to implementations which are not just platform- but processor- and even architecture-version-specific in nature? How do you even start tracking down a bug in a Scala-based implementation which is not only non-deterministic but only manifests on certain hardware? In this talk, we will dive into the wild and ill-understood world of CPU architecture, memory models, and JVM intrinsics (all through the lens of very high-level purely functional abstractions!) as we examine the story of the most convoluted and mind-bending bug hunt of my entire career.

“Functional Programming” is the modern received wisdom regarding program and language design. All the cool kids talk about writing code that is “functional” or even “purely functional”. However, functional programming as it is traditionally defined really doesn’t cut the mustard, and if you look at how modern functional architectures are being shaped, everyone seems to have tacitly arrived at the same conclusion: more is needed. In this talk, we will look at how modern functional languages like Scala, Clojure and even Haskell have evolved beyond the simple paradigms of the lambda calculus. We will see how the industry has really moved beyond functional programming and into the realm of something more powerful, more expressive and better suited to the task of large application architecture.

“Functional Programming” is the modern received wisdom regarding program and language design. All the cool kids talk about writing code that is “functional” or even “purely functional”. However, functional programming as it is traditionally defined really doesn’t cut the mustard, and if you look at how modern functional architectures are being shaped, everyone seems to have tacitly arrived at the same conclusion: more is needed. In this talk, we will look at how modern functional languages like Scala, Clojure and even Haskell have evolved beyond the simple paradigms of the lambda calculus. We will see how the industry has really moved beyond functional programming and into the realm of something more powerful, more expressive and better suited to the task of large application architecture.

“Functional Programming” is the modern received wisdom regarding program and language design. All the cool kids talk about writing code that is “functional” or even “purely functional”. However, functional programming as it is traditionally defined really doesn’t cut the mustard, and if you look at how modern functional architectures are being shaped, everyone seems to have tacitly arrived at the same conclusion: more is needed. In this talk, we will look at how modern functional languages like Scala, Clojure and even Haskell have evolved beyond the simple paradigms of the lambda calculus. We will see how the industry has really moved beyond functional programming and into the realm of something more powerful, more expressive and better suited to the task of large application architecture.