The Haskell Interlude

Tom Ellis works at Groq, using Haskell to compile AI models to specialized hardware.  In this episode, we talk about stability of both GHC and Haskell libraries, effects, and strictness, and the premise of functional programming: make invalid states and invalid *laziness* unrepresentable! 

Sam and Wouter interview Harry Goldstein, a researcher in property-based testing who works in PL, SE, and HCI. In this episode, we reflect on random generators, the find-a-friend model, interdisciplinary research, and how to have impact beyond your own research community.

In this episode, Matti and Sam traveled to the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2024) in Milan, Italy, and recorded snippets with various participants, including keynote speakers, Haskell legends, and organizers.

Gabriele Keller, professor at Utrecht University, is interviewed by Andres and Joachim. We follow her journey through the world as well as programming languages, learn why Haskell is the best environment for embedding languages and how the desire to implement parallel programming sparked the development of type families in Haskell and that teaching functional programming works better with graphics.

Today on the Haskell Interlude, Matti and Sam are joined by Satnam Singh. Satnam has been a lecturer at Glasgow, and Software Engineer at Google, Meta, and now Groq. He talks about convincing people to use Haskell, laying out circuits and why community matters.PS: After the recording, it was important to Satnam to clarify that his advise to “not be afraid to loose your job” was specially meant to encourage to quit jobs that are not good for you, if possible, but he acknowledges that unfortunately not everybody can afford that risk.

In this episode, Niki and Andres talk with Sebastian, one of the main developers of Lean, currently working at the Lean Focused Research Organization. Today we talk about the addictive notion of theorem provers, what is a sweet spot between dependent types and simple programming and how Lean is both a theorem prover and an efficient general purpose programming language. 

In this episode, Wouter and Sam interview Dominic Orchard. Dominic has many roles, including: senior lecturer at the University of Kent, co-director of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, and bye-fellow of Queen’s College in Cambridge. We will not only discuss his work on Granule - graded monads, coeffects, and linear types - but also his collaboration with actual scientists to improve the languages with which they work.

In this episode, Garrett Morris talks with Wouter Swierstra  and Niki Vazou about his work on Haskell’s type classes, how to fail successfully, and how to construct a set of ponies.

Andres and Sam interview Pepe Iborra, exploring his journey from academia via banking to now Meta. In this episode, we discuss Pepe’s involvement in the evolution of the Haskell ecosystem, in particular the ongoing journey to improve the developer experience via work on debuggers, build systems and IDEs.

Victor Miraldo is interviewed by Niki and Joachim and walks us through this career from a student falling in love with List.foldr through a PhD student using agda to verify cryptographic data structures and generic diff and merge algorithms to a professional developer using Haskell in production. He’ll tell us why the Haskell community is too smart, why there should be a safePerformIO, and that he hopes that Software Engineering could be less like alchemy.