"Why in the world would I write code like this??" I asked myself, as I scratched my head.

It was the first time I had tried to learn functional programming. To me, it seemed like it was a stylistic choice for programming that was bizarre for no good reason. Do the folks inventing this stuff just like to seem smart and leave the rest of us fools to flounder with our object-oriented and imperative languages? What am I missing?

Eventually, I had my "aha" moment.

In this session, we'll walk through five key learnings from my journey learning functional programming -- five fundamental approaches to building software that I believe make a strong case for the value in learning, applying, and teaching functional programming. By the end of this session, functional programming won't be a wizard's ancient magic -- it will be a valuable and accessible tool that anyone can utilize to write great software!