Zainab is a functional polyglot. She organizes the London Scala User Group and contributes to many functional libraries when she can. She enjoys coding in Scala, Rust, Haskell, Idris, PureScript, Racket and anything she can get her hands on.

Meta teaching with Scalameta

Why is functional programming hard? Are Monads really like burritos? And why do we always compare them?

Despite the wealth of resources available, many developers find functional programming challenging. In this talk, we argue that it’s not the content that we teach, but the way in which we teach it, that is important.

Stealing from the pedagogic programming language of Racket, we explore how tools such as Scalameta can help us take a different approach. At the end, we’ll be none the wiser as to what Monads truly are, but perhaps we’ll have a better path to explaining them.