Swift Functional Programming

Swift is one of the most interesting modern languages that you’ll encounter in your travels, and with its recent open-source release growing its relevance across myriad different communities, it’s a language worth learning. Swift is great for traditional, imperative programming, but especially excels at functional programming.

This session will explore the basics of functional programming with Swift 2.0 using examples. It operates under the assumption that you are familiar with iterative programming in a relatively modern, or heavily-used language, such as Python, Java, C#, Perl 6, or similar. We’ll explore some of the things functional programming is good at, such as filtering, reducing numbers, indexing, and more, and we’ll do it using Swift’s powerful and easy-to-understand functional programming features. We’ll also do it using Swift’s really, really, really cool REPL (read-evaluate-print-loop) live programming environment, Playgrounds.

Learn why Swift might be useful to you, how to use it for the basics of functional programming, and where to go next on your Swift adventure. We’ll also briefly look at how to set it up under Linux, as well as popular open-source libraries to make functional programming even more exciting with Swift, such as Dollar.swift, Promissum, Result, and Swiftz.

Paris Buttfield-Addison

Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison is co-founder of Secret Lab, a mobile development studio based in beautiful Hobart, Australia. Secret Lab builds award winning games and apps for mobile devices. Paris formerly worked as mobile product manager for Meebo (acquired by Google), has a BA in Medieval History, a PhD in Computing, and writes technical books on mobile and game development for O’Reilly Media. He can be found on Twitter @parisba and online at http://paris.id.au.