When The New Stack Editor-in-Chief Alex Williams sat down with Pivotal’s VP of Technology Cornelia Davis at SpringOne Platform in Austin Texas, they had a lot to talk about. Almost 40 years. Davis’s tech career began in aeronautics which could go give years from code written to rocket launched. She has journeyed right alongside as we went from SOA and SOAP to REST to the distributed systems we have today. During her talk and in this conversation, she reflects on the patterns that drove APIs from a RESTful layer toward toward true autonomy, where everything is as loosely coupled as possible, with bounded context.

A chat with Davis feels one third practical computing, one third theoretical mathematical foundations, and a third grammar. To give context to the chat, let’s give some background.

The traditional object-oriented or imperative programming is focused on using statements to change a program’s state. On the other hand,

declarative or functional programming focuses on what the program should accomplish and isn’t worried about how that result is achieved, This is why the first is referred to as stateful programming, while the latter is stateless.

In this conversation, Davis describes functional programming as a statement of relationship between the first part of a problem and the rest of the problem. You trust that the second half of that problem is correct, so all that is important is how you combine these things.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZCbWNBw_fHg