Past and Present of Haskell – Interview with Simon Peyton Jones

Some time ago, we got a fantastic opportunity to interview Simon Peyton Jones, who was a key contributor to the design of Haskell and one of the lead designers of Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). Right now, Simon is working at Microsoft Research, where he researches functional programming languages.

In the interview, we discussed the past, present, and future of Haskell, Haskell’s benefits and downsides, GHC, walking the line between Haskell being a research and industry language, and multiple other topics.

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Highlights: https://serokell.io/blog/past-and-pre...
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0:00 Intro
1:17 How to teach Haskell to beginner programmers?
4:00 Teaching functional programming with Excel
8:17 Haskell ecosystem
14:34 Tradeoff between development velocity and the proposal system in GHC
21:58 If a new compiler would be made, are there areas where it could be improved?
28:23 Haskell Foundation
34:25 Which mechanism of code generation to prefer in Haskell?
38:45 Which additions to Haskell changed your programming style the most?
47:26 What if the community had a stable and experimential version of the compiler?
50:37 How Haskell broke out of the growth feedback loop
54:52 Why are there no competing Haskell compilers?
58:24 Should there be an effort to select a set of libraries as standard?
1:03:22 What would you tell to Haskell beginners about laziness?
1:08:35 How do you use laziness in practice?
1:13:01 How do you feel about the modern state of software development and Haskell's place in it?
1:18:08 What do you think about the future of computing?
1:24:10 What can a new contributor to GHC expect in terms of work?
1:28:27 Is there a risk of centralization of Haskell?
1:34:18 Do Haskell engineers need to have a deeper background in mathematics?
1:40:54 Closing thoughts