Christophe Grand Clojure/conj 2016 Speaker Interview

Christophe Grand will be giving a talk at Clojure/conj 2016. He will be speaking about Powderkeg, which is a library for using Apache Spark.

Follow him on Twitter and GitHub.

PurelyFunctional.tv: How did you get into functional programming?

Christophe Grand: A math professor, Dr Daniel Goffinet, who in engineering prep school taught me functional programming (in Caml Light) and CS fundamentals. FP almost immediately clicked for me.

PF.tv: What is your talk about?

CG: My talk is about Powderkeg a library for Apache Spark. This library strives to minimize API surface and to offer a dynamic experience (no AOT). With Powderkeg a Spark cluster becomes a transducing context and it's possible to connect a REPL to an unsuspecting cluster and live code on it.

PF.tv: What do you hope people will take away from the talk?

CG: That transducers do a really good job of allowing to express computations independent of their input sources and output sinks.

PF.tv: What concepts do you recommend people be familiar with to maximize their experience with the talk?

CG: Basic understanding of Clojure transducers and Spark RDDs.

PF.tv: What resources are available for people who want to study up before the talk?

CG: We are still in the process of open-sourcing Powderkeg. xforms is a collection of transducers that proves useful in conjunction with Powderkeg (or in any other transducing context).

PF.tv: Where can people follow you online?

CG: On Twitter: [@cgrand]Twitter

PF.tv: Are there any projects you'd like people to be aware of? How can people help out?

CG: Counterclockwise (Clojure Plugin for Eclipse) is looking for a new maintainer.

PF.tv: Where do you see the state of functional programming in 10 years?

CG: In the same way that FP confines imperative/stateful programming to where it matters, I hope that in 10 years more declarative forms (logic?) will confine FP.

PF.tv: If functional programming were a superhero, what superpower would it have?

CG: Stopping time.