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 Agd...

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 episode, we’re joined by Michael Snoyman, author of Yesod, Conduit, Stackage and many other popular Haskell libraries. We discuss newcomer friendliness, being a Rustacean vs a Haskellasaur, how STM is Haskell’s best feature and how laziness can be a vice.

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 d...

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.

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 unfortu...

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.