The first day most of the sessions were on a very high level and there was a lot of talk about Free Monads, Tagless final and category theory. Upcoming news about Scalaz 8 and cats and what they have learnt along the way there. It was obvious that you should already be familiar with monads, monoids, applicatives and the monadic laws to get the most out of the advanced sessions.
The second day the sessions were more focused on how you can apply beautiful functional concepts to improve your code with state monads and cats validation.
Good discussions on what can be learnt and applied from other languages. It feels like the Scala community has matured and started experimenting with more advanced things now that there are more people familiar with the language.
I felt that my workshop on Scala for Java developers was well received. The attendees had a little or no experience of Scala since before but all of them saw opportunities to use it at work. I get the feeling that Scala is becoming more popular and accepted even in enterprise environments where Java has been the only choice before.
It’s great to see that my feeling that functional programming languages is getting more popular is also reflected in surveys. The industry is slowly going towards less null reference exceptions and code that is easier to parallelise.
