Recently, many people in the functional programming community, and specifically in the Scala community, seem to follow the trend of solving their programming problems with more and more fancy abstractions and techniques. If in doubt, we throw a monad at the problem, and if that’s not good enough, we’ll make it free. Naturally, to top it off, we have to sprinkle the whole thing with some type-level programming, because this is common courtesy these days.

In this talk I want to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions of how we think and work. With all our sophisticated engineering, are we actually solving the right problems? Are we rushing towards technologically exciting solutions too quickly? How much of the complexity in our software is inherent in the problem domain, and how much of it is of our own making? We may have honorable intentions, but do our solutions come at an acceptable price? Maybe it’s time to slow down, think about what the problems we have to solve actually are, and how to do so in the simplest way possible.