Alissa Pajer began her functional programming career as a Scala engineer at Precog. She worked there for two years, until Precog was acquired by RichRelevance, her current employer. Before her coding days, she studied pure mathematics, earning a Bachelors from Carleton College and a Masters from the University of Colorado. She currently lives in Munich, Germany, where she spends her non-computer time hiking, running, swimming, and cycling.

Learning Haskell is about more than learning new syntax and understanding the function signatures of its many modules. It's even about more than defining your own type classes and implementing new Functors. Learning Haskell is about putting yourself in a position where your mental abstractions can (and will!) drastically change for the better. In this talk, we'll explore through example how and why Haskell provides us with so many opportunities for these mind-changing moments. Furthermore, we'll discuss how these changes in our brains shape how we approach functional programming.

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