One might think that the bleak, anti-utopian reality of Orwell’s 1984 would be a poor choice for a source of constructive ideas about programming. But it so happens, that the three main slogans of the book: “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength” map very neatly into good practices for programming in general and functional programming in particular. In this talk, guided by the slogans and driven by concrete code examples, we will see how to battle effects, choose the right abstractions and use parametricity to lead us to the correct implementation.
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