Skills Matter has organized the first of its annual Scala eXchange events for the 15-16 June 2011 — they’re aiming for this two day mini-conference to become the most exciting London-based Scala event on the calendar of anyone passionate about Scala.

I’ll be speaking on Thursday afternoon, though not about the Scala IDE for Eclipse as advertised (I’m delighted to report that Martin Odersky will be talking about the work that he and Typesafe have recently contributed to the open source project). Instead I’ll be talking about representing polymorphic function values in Scala using type classes. Scala makes good on its claim to blend object-oriented and functional programming styles by representing functions as values. Scala values, however, are monomorphic, so representing polymorphic functions requires a little extra effort. In my talk I’ll describe a new type class based approach to encoding polymorphic function values, compare it with other encodings, and demonstrate some of its practical applications.

Looking forward to seeing you there if you’re able to make it. And if not, check back here in a few days for a blog post on the technicalities, or check out my Advanced Scala training course which covers the same material. I’ll be offering it publicly in September, again at Skills Matter.