This week marks 6 months since we launched Point-Free. In that time we’ve released 24 episodes with over 12 hours of video, published 9 blog posts, had 33 thousand unique visitors, more than 400 subscriptions, and open sourced 3 libraries from the topics covered in our episodes.

The content covered so far spans a broad range of topics, from core functional programming concepts that will be the building block of later ideas, to the immediately useful ideas that can be brought into your codebase today. We strive to strike a balance between the theoretical and the practical, and always ask ourselves “what’s the point?” to prove to our viewers that these things are worth learning.

To celebrate our 6 month anniversary, we are making one of our most popular episodes free to everyone: Algebraic Data Types. In this episode we set an important foundation of understanding the Swift type system in terms of algebra. This allows us to do very powerful refactorings of our data types that would otherwise be very counterintuitive and difficult to see. If this episode piques your interest, you may also want to checkout the two follow up episodes that go deeper into algebraic data types: Exponents and Generic Functions and Recursion.

We’ve been having a lot of fun making episodes so far, but we’re only just getting started. We haven’t yet talked about how flatMap fits into the map and zip story we have been developing. We also need to explore what functional programming has to say about async operations. And functional programming is well-regarded as a good tool for parsing, but we haven’t said anything about that yet. There’s still so much more to cover!

So, we hope you’ll join us for the next 6 months in diving even deeper into functional programming and Swift. And if you’re not a subscriber, please consider subscribing today!