Hello. This is not going to be a talk about Scala. This is not going to be a practical talk, in the sense that it is unlikely the ideas in it are going to make you a better developer in two days time, when you are back coding your current scala project. On the plus side, the concepts we will discuss will still be relevant a year from now and ten years from now.
Scala community is diverse; people with background in down-to-earth enigneering intermingle with those well versed in mathematics and programming language theory. We tend to see terms such as "type lambda", "soundness", "Church encoding" etc. in discussions about language features and approaches to programming problems.
While this talk will not explain all those concepts -- 45 minutes, giver or take, are in now way sufficient -- it is meant to give you some background to formal methods as they relate to programming languages, present the lay of the land and inspire you to continue the exploration on your own. All I am hoping to do today is to pique your interest and give some pointers where to go next.