At the 2014 August CocoaHeads meetup in Sydney we were verty fortunate to have Manuel Chakravarty give us a talk titled “Swift—Adopting functional programming”. Manuel is an internationally renowned expert on functional programming based here in Sydney. Manuel is this year’s program chair of ICFP (The International Conference on Functional Programming), but he took time to talk to just a few days before flying out.

Apple’s new language Swift supports functional programming while being tightly integrated with Objective-C and Cocoa. This has sent the developer community on an adventure to explore how ideas from functional programming might help writing great apps for iOS and OS X. In this talk, I will concentrate on two of these ideas: types and immutable data structures. How do they benefit development, and how do they affect code architecture?

In addition to the video (which includes the slides) you can find just Manuel’s slides on SpeakerDeck.

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As always, Sydney CocoaHeads brought to you by The High Technology Bureau and sponsored by Atlassian. Thanks to Craig Stanford for supplying and manning the video camera this month.