Simon Peyton Jones: In Pursuit of Simplicity

Today’s guest is Simon Peyton Jones – a hugely influential computer scientist who has spent his career researching the implementation and applications of functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional programming. After a stint in academia, he joined Microsoft Research Cambridge (1998-2022) where he spent more than 20 years before becoming an Engineering Fellow at Epic Games last year.

Simon’s main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and was the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

He is also the Chair of Computing at School, the grass-roots organisation which helped lead to the reform in our English computing curriculum in 2014, now making the subject compulsory in all schools.

In this conversation, we discuss how he fell in love with programming, how he approaches complex problems, what Epic’s Tim Sweeny’s vision is for the metaverse and why he believes all kids should code.

Simon’s enthusiasm for the field of computer science is hugely infectious and whether you know of him already or not, I think you will really enjoy this episode.

Simon Peyton Jones Website / Twitter / GitHub / Computing at School

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