I went to the Functional Swift Conference yesterday; (12/7/14). For those of you who did not attend, videos will be posted soon and I would highly recommend you to check them out when they are posted. Big thanks to the organizers for putting this all together and Kickstarter for hosting the event!

It was quite good. The conference was free of charge, but they surely could have charged a decent amount of money for attendance.

The quality of the speakers was top notch, and each provided great, and unique contributions to a solid central message further convincing me of the fact that functional programming is the future and further introducing me to the power and desirability of writing software or parts of software with a functional mindset. Functional programming is gaining in popularity, and I think this is a good thing for software.

Even if you do not implement these concepts, it will become increasingly important that you understand them as a Cocoa developer. As software engineers, it is our jobs to solve problems; and using functional programming can help solve certain problems in a better way. I think everyone can agree that it is always best to use the best tool, methodology, etc to solve problems. If nothing else, understanding of these concepts will be essential to (an increasing amount) companies who have embraced it in their codebases.

Something pretty much everyone who is first learning about or starting to understand functional programming is that it seems more complex then what they are used to. As many of the speakers talked about at the conference, there is a difference between easy and simple. Easy != simple. Something that is easy is something that is comfortable; therefore subjective. Simplicity is objective; and something we all strive for in our systems.

I am excited to bring more of these ideas into the codebases that I work on.