Larry Garfield has been building web sites since he was a sophomore in high school, which is longer ago than he’d like to admit. As a freelancer he worked mostly for Chicago-area politicians before graduating to full time consulting with Palantir.net.

At Palantir, Larry is a Senior Architect and Consultant, developing solutions for medium to large cultural institutions.

Larry is an active Drupal core contributor, including the principle architect and maintainer of the Drupal 7 database system. For Drupal 8 he is leading the charge to rebuild Drupal’s core code base into a powerful REST framework, leveraging the Symfony2 framework. He also served for four years as a member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors. Larry is a Zend-certified PHP 5 developer with a Master’s degree in Computer Science from DePaul University.

Larry co-authored “Drupal 7 Module Development” from Packt Publishing, and has also been published numerous times in Drupal Watchdog. He blogs at both http://palantir.net and http://garfieldtech.com.

Talk: Functional PHP

Functional programming. Some see that term and think “functions? You mean procedural programming. I’ve been doing that for years.” Others see it and think “you mean that crazy academic nonsense that no one understands? Pfft!”

In truth, functional programming is fundamentally an approach to software development, not a particular language or syntax. With PHP 5.3, it is an approach that is now more readily available and powerful than ever before. Even if you’re not writing in Erlang or ML, there is still much to learn from the principles of functional programming to help write better code.

This session will discuss the history of functional programming and how it compares to other programming paradigms (procedural and object-oriented). We will then delve into how to leverage the concepts and tools in PHP 5.3 to produce more robust code with an “algorithm-first” approach.