Dr Frankenfunctor and the Monadster

This page contains links to the slides and video from my talk “Dr Frankenfunctor and the Monadster”.

WARNING: This talk contains:

• gruesome topics
• strained analogies
• discussion of monads

Here’s the blurb for the talk:

You’ve got a pile of assorted functions lying around. Each one is useful and reliable, but they just don’t fit together properly. How can you assemble them into a complete system that can stand on its own two feet and terrorize the local villagers?

In this session, I’ll show how functional programming can transform all sorts of existing code into shapes that are plug-compatible and which can be bolted together effortlessly.

SAFETY NOTE: The techniques demonstrated are perfectly harmless and can even be used at your workplace – no lightning bolts required.

Video from NDC London 2016, Jan 14, 2016 (Click image to view video)

Slides from Leetspeak 2015, Stockholm, Oct 10, 2015

This talk inspired a series of blog posts on this same topic:

• Dr Frankenfunctor and the Monadster
• Completing the body of the Monadster
• Refactoring the Monadster

Also related are the posts on map and bind, and on two-track error handling:

• Map and Bind and Apply, Oh my!
• A functional approach to error handling (“Railway Oriented Programming”)

In the summer of 2015, the team organizing Leetspeak asked me to present a talk on the theme of “It’s Alive”.

I was feeling uninspired, so of course I grasped at the most obvious and unimaginative metaphor possible – the story of Frankenstein. And the idea of building a body from various ill-fitting parts then led naturally to the talk being about function composition, and transforming ill-fitting functions to a consistent shape using map and bind.

Generally I don’t like to make my talks too complicated, but the organizers explicitly said that they wanted hard and complex stuff! Ok then!

And they seemed to like it:

.@ScottWlaschin talk is exactly what we aimed for #leetspeak. Leaves you mindblown and feeling that there's stuff you still need to learn.:D

— Michal Lusiak (@mlusiak) October 10, 2015

So, apologies if you find it too intense. I plead diminished responsibility!