About the authors

RAOUL-GABRIEL URMA is CEO and co-founder of Cambridge Spark, a leading learning community for data scientists and developers in the UK. Raoul was nominated a Java Champion in 2017. He has worked for Google, eBay, Oracle, and Goldman Sachs. Raoul completed a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. In addition, he holds a MEng in Computer Science from Imperial College London and graduated with first-class honors, having won several prizes for technical innovation. Raoul has delivered over 100 technical talks at international conferences.

MARIO FUSCO is a senior software engineer at Red Hat working on the core development of Drools, the JBoss rule engine. He has vast experience as a Java developer, having been involved in (and often leading) many enterprise-level projects in several industries ranging from media companies to the financial sector. Among his interests are functional programming and domain-specific languages. By leveraging these two passions, he created the open source library lambdaj with the goal of providing an internal Java DSL for manipulating collections and allowing a bit of functional programming in Java.

ALAN MYCROFT is professor of computing in the Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University, where he has been a faculty member since 1984. He’s also a fellow at Robinson College, a co-founder of the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems, and a co-founder and trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. He has degrees in Mathematics (Cambridge) and Computer Science (Edinburgh). He’s the author of about 100 research papers and has supervised more than 20 PhD theses. His research centers on programming languages and their semantics, optimization, and implementation. He maintains strong industrial links, having worked at AT&T Laboratories and Intel Research during academic leave, as well as spinning out Codemist Ltd., which built the original ARM C compiler under the Norcroft name.