scale.bythebay.io: Adelbert Chang, The Functor, Applicative, Monad talk
ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Scale By the Bay 2019 is held on November 13-15 in sunny Oakland, California, on the shores of Lake Merritt: https://scale.bythebay.io. Join us!
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Functors, applicatives, and monads are fundamental tools for some programmers, yet for many others they are considered immaterial. Indeed there are extremely few languages which offer support for even talking about these concepts. Why then are these programmers so fixated on them? What about them makes them so desirable and necessary? In this talk we will explore the what and why of these concepts and hopefully leave you understanding, if not convinced of, their utility.
Adelbert Chang
Lead Data Engineer, Target
Adelbert is a programmer at Target where he builds tooling and infrastructure for the data science and optimization team. In his free time he explores the intersection of functional programming and systems design and watches random videos on the Internet.