Open Collective Interview with Brooke

Alanna Irving from the Open Collective team interviewed m on Witchcraft: the magic of math, functional programming, and community.

Did you know she started in music composition?

Programming absolutely scratches the same part of my brain as music composition. Instead of writing instructions for an instrumentalist, you’re writing it for a computer, but the parallels are very clear. All but one person in my composition cohort (who became a professor of music) are now programmers, because it was a crash course in that way of thinking.

It's a great overview of Brooke's background, her love of functional programming and math, and the Witchcraft library for Elixir:

witchcrafters / witchcraft

Monads and other dark magic for Elixir

Witchcraft is a library providing common algebraic and categorical abstractions to Elixir Monoids, functors, monads, arrows, categories, and other dark magic right at your fingertips.

README

Table of Contents

• Quick Start
• Library Family
• Values
• Type Class Hierarchy
• Writing Class Instances
• Operators
• Haskell Translation Table
• Prior Art and Further Reading
• Credits

Quick Start

def deps do
  [{:witchcraft, "~> 1.0"}]
end
# ...
use Witchcraft

Library Family

Quark    TypeClass
    ↘    ↙
   Witchcraft
       ↓
     Algae

Name	Description
Quark	Standard combinators (id, compose, &c)
TypeClass	Used internally to generate type classes
Algae	Algebraic data types that implement Witchcraft type classes

Values

Beginner Friendliness

You shouldn't have to learn another language just to understand powerful abstractions By enabling people to use a language that they already know, and is already in the same ballpark in terms of values (emphasis on immutability, &c), we can teach and learn…

View on GitHub

You can follow Brooke here on DevTO as @expede :

Brooklyn Zelenka 🏳️‍🌈

expede

Edit: Is third person weird when you're talking about yourself???