Functional Development with Kotlin

Kotlin is a wonderful modern programming language and a more than worthy successor of Java. It provides a big bunch of features for functional programming. But, being a hybrid, Kotlin also provides support for classical imperative development. Thus, it is easy to mix the concepts and loosing alle the nice benefits you get from a pure functional style.

In this tutorial I would like to introduce what actually is the essence of functional programming and how this can be done with plain Kotlin. I will show how to replace typical imperative code structures with functional ones. Finally I will have a look about performance. Are the functional variants actually slower than the imperative ones or even faster? If there is enough time left, I will even show, how the code examples are done in a pure functional programming language, such as Haskell.

Participants should bring a laptop with a browser installed - we are planning coding exercises using Kotlin Playgrounds.

Torsten Fink

@tnfinkacq

Dr. Torsten Fink ist Geschäftsführer der Berliner Einheit der akquinet. Neben der Leitung von Softwareprojekten führte er vor seiner Managementtätigkeit Architektur- und Technologieberatungen durch. Aus dem eher technischen Bereich verteilter Systeme kommend, beschäftigt er sich in letzter Zeit immer mehr mit qualitätsorientierten Prozessen und modernen Organisationsstrukturen. Wenn irgendwie Zeit übrig bleibt, kümmert er sich um seine alte Leidenschaft, der funktionalen Programmierung.

Slides

fink.pdf