Rúnar Óli Bjarnason (@runarorama) says, “Functional programming makes us happy… programming is exhilaration… programming is exciting.”

He says this however, after telling us why Scala is not always up to the task of the requirements of functional programming. It lacks tail call elimination; forcing the use of trampolines. It boxes functions leaving a greater memory footprint. It struggles with higher kinds; forcing bizarre type annotation boiler plate.

But he says, “functional programming is awesome” as it leads to predictable, testable, modular, smaller, and easier to reason about code. We feel good and we have pride in our work as it “looks and feels clean.”

He says, “we have to insist that Scala gets better at Functional Programming or we have to leave it behind.”

Come get in touch with your feelings with Rúnar. Your happiness matters.

You can find the talk here on YouTube.