George Wilson
Functional Programming EngineerPaidRight
George Wilson is an enthusiastic functional programmer from Brisbane, Australia. George is known for his distinctive talks about useful abstractions. He is currently at PaidRight, helping Australians get paid correctly, and was a founding member of the Queensland Functional Programming Lab (QFPL). George sits on the Haskell Core Libraries Committee, which guides the direction of Haskell's standard library, and he co-organises the Brisbane Functional Programming Group.
Talks I've Given
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Cultivating an Engineering Dialect
Featuring George Wilson
Haskell has seen success in commercial environments, with teams of professional engineers choosing it for its claims of reliability, a rapid development pace, and easier maintenance over the long term. On top of that, a large community of hobbyist tinkerers and academic researchers are always...
haskell -
Functional Programming in Education
Featuring George Wilson
This talk looks at how functional programming has been used in tertiary education, and how it could be used in the future.
practice
In 1985, Abelson and Sussman's course Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs made enduring contributions to the art of educating programmers. How to Design... -
Comma Police: Lessons From the Design and Implementation of a CSV Library
Featuring George Wilson
From CSV, to JSON, to YAML, DER, and the dreaded XML, many programmers are dealing with data formats all day. In statically-typed languages like Haskell, we can get a great benefit by imposing a rigid structure of types on the data we consume from these formats. We call this process of imposing...
technique -
Contravariant Functors: The Other Side of the Coin
Featuring George Wilson
Since their introduction, Applicative and its sidekick Alternative have become ubiquitous and beloved type classes in Haskell and similar languages such as Purescript. By contrast, their contravariant counterparts are relatively unknown. These contravariant structures are useful, and their time...
concept -
The Extended Functor Family
Featuring George Wilson
Functors are ubiquitous in modern strongly-typed functional programming. Every Haskell beginner will come across them as one of the first typeclasses introduced. Stronger structures such as Applicative and Monad often steal the spotlight, but there are many structures related to the humble...
language -
When Less is More and More is Less: Trade-Offs in Algebra
Featuring George Wilson
Functional programmers love to steal ideas from mathematics. Perhaps the best example of this is the venerable monoid, a concept from abstract algebra. But what about other algebraic structures? Semigroups and semilattices, related to monoids and beloved by mathematicians, are also ripe for use...
technique