The Haskell Interlude

We sat down with Phil Wadler, one of the most influential folks in the Haskell community, functional programming, and programming languages, responsible for type classes, monads, and much more. We take a stroll down memory lane, starting from Haskell's inception. We talked about the difference between research and Phil's work on impactful industrial projects and standards - specifically XML and the design of generics in Java, as well as Phll's teaching at the University of Edinburgh using Agda.. Phil is a fountain of great ideas and stories, and this conversation could have gone on for hours. As it is, we hope you enjoy the hour that we had as much as we did. 

Today’s guest is Jurriaan Hage. Jurriaan is a professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh who’s worked with and on Haskell for many years. He’s known for the Helium Haskell compiler, specifically designed for teaching, and he has plenty of other projects related to Haskell, including improvements to the type system, the generation of better error messages, or detection of plagiarism. 

In this engaging conversation, Michael Snoyman, the creator of popular Haskell libraries like Yesod and Conduit, shares his journey from Haskell to Rust. He discusses the challenges of lazy IO and introduces Conduit as a better alternative for data handling. The importance of making programming languages like Haskell accessible for newcomers is a key theme. Snoyman also reflects on Haskell's legacy in modern programming, touching on type systems and the evolution of the Haskell ecosystem, including insights on performance in web development.

Mike and Andres speak to Alex McLean who created the TidalCycles system for electronic music - implemented in Haskell of course. We talk about how Alex got into Haskell coming from Perl, how types helped him think about the structure of music and patterns, the architecture and evolution of TidalCycles, about art, community and making space for new ideas, and lots of things in between.

Niki and Mike talked to Daniele Micciancio who is a professor at UC San Diego. He's been using Haskell for 20 years, and works in lattice cryptography. We talked to him about how he got into Haskell, using Haskell for teaching theoretical computer science and of course for his research and the role type systems and comonads could play in the design of cryptographic algorithms. Along the way, he gave an accessible introduction to post-quantum cryptography which we really enjoyed. We hope you do, too. 

Andy Gordon from Cogna is interviewed by Sam and Matti. We learn about Andy’s influential work including the origins of the bind symbol in haskell, and the introduction of lambdas in Excel. We go onto discuss his current work at Cogna on using AI to allow non-programmers to write apps using natural language. We delve deeper into the ethics of AI and consider the most likely AI apocalypse.

In this episode Mike Sperber and Niki Vazou talk with Sandy Maguire, lead compiler engineer at Manifold Valley. They talk about the benefits of using Haskell of course, about all the books Sandy has written, on effects and the problem with monads, on combinator libraries and programming with laws.

On this episode of the Haskell Interlude, Andres Löh and Mike Sperber are joined by Farhad Mehta, a professor at OST Rapperswil, and one of the organizers of ZuriHac. Fahrad tells us about formal methods, building tunnels, the importance of education, and the complicated relationship between academia and industry.

In this episode Wouter Swiestra and Niki Vazou talk with Conal Elliott. Conal discusses doing things just for the poetry, how most programs miss their purpose, and the simplest way to ask a question. Conal is currently working on a book about his ideas and actively looking for partners. 

Sam Lindley is a Reader in Programming Languages Design and Implementation at the University of Edinburgh. In this episode, he tells us how difficult naming is, the different kinds of effect systems and handlers, languages *much* purer than Haskell, and Modal logic.