Functional + NoSQL == *HOT*
Dave Thomas was in town stirring up all the geeks with his talk titled “Why Real Developers Embrace Functional Programming and NoSQL Data”. I had a great time meeting some old friends, and hearing Dave cut through the crowd with the sharp tongue that he has.
His central message was to never stop learning.
We’ve become a monoculture of object oriented programmers living in a world of relational databases. Remember the horrors of EJB’s persistence layer? Well, even Rails’ ActiveRecord is just a slicker version of the same nonsense. The object-relational impedance mismatch was never breached. Same old layers of icing on the same old shit.
And he doesn’t like frameworks very much either. Layer upon layer upon… you get the idea :-)
If you’re still maintaining the status quo of Relational databases and Object Oriented languages, Dave would like to remind you that you’ve turned into a row farmer :-)
So what do we do? He argued that we should look at the shinier side of functional programming which has famously had lower KLOCs, and the now blinding presence of all the NoSQL databases which are more flexible and perhaps better suited to your problem domain.
I swear I never want to write another many-to-many join table with composite keys. Sign me up :-)
