Some rabbit holes are so far off the beaten track that when you find them they're essentially irresistible. This is one of those rabbit holes.

Go is a pragmatic language with good tooling that's quick to learn and well suited to writing concurrent and network aware programs. Its design is generally conservative and so is its community, only gaining Generics a decade after release. It doesn't seem like fertile ground for Functional Programming.

And yet...

Go has functions. Not pure functions admittedly, but certainly first class functions with closures. That opens up some possibilities if we don't mind cutting some corners.

Join me for a friendly introduction to functions in Go. There will be a couple of simple problems to illustrate the ideas we’ll be covering, plenty of code you can study later, and a few thought-provoking examples which may permanently change the way you think about Go.

This talk has had two prior outings. Once as a keynote at GoLab (2019), and later an unrecorded workshop at GopherCon UK (2020).