Hans Hübner :clojureD 2017 Interview

Hans Hübner will be giving a talk at :clojureD 2017. The title of his presentation is "Identity in a World of Values".

Follow him on his Homepage, GitHub and Twitter.

PurelyFunctional.tv: How did you get into Clojure?

Hans Hübner: I was a Common Lisp programmer for several years, but I was moving towards a more data centric programming style and found that Common Lisp would not support that very well, out of the box. Also, I was in need of easy interfacing to Java libraries.

PF.tv: What is your talk about?

HH: One of the difficult programming problems to solve, in any language, is persistence. Functional programming brings additional challenges to the solution of the persistence problem, as immutability does not blend well with the concept of identity. After all, identity is about preserving a handle to something that changes over time. Object oriented languages combine the concept of identity and value into objects. Clojure, being a functional language, requires thinking about identity in different ways as the inherent combination of an identity and associated values does not exist in it, as a first-class concept.

In my talk, I'm going to present approaches to the persistence problem and how identity, values and transactions can be thought of separately and combined to yield a solution to persisting data.

PF.tv: Who is your talk for?

HH: I'm addressing programmers with some knowledge of Clojure. A background in object oriented programming will be useful, but is not required.

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

HH: My hope is that I can present some inspiration to think about persistence and how Clojure's mechanisms can be combined to yield solutions that are elegant and easy to reason about.

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

HH: It will be helpful to understand identity, transactions and object systems.

PF.tv: Where can people follow you online?

HH: I am @hanshuebner on Twitter and HansHuebner on GitHub.