The Haskell Interlude

In this episode, Andres Löh and Matthías Páll Gissurarson interview José Nuno Oliveira, who has been teaching Haskell for 30 years. José talks about how Haskell is the perfect language to introduce programming to all sorts of audiences, why it is important to start with Haskell, and how the programmers of the future have been learning Haskell for several years already!

Avi Press is interviewed by Joachim Breitner and Andres Löh. Avi is the founder of Scarf, which uses Haskell to analyze how open source software is used. We’ll hear about the kind of shitstorm telemetry can cause, when correctness matters less than fearless refactoring and how that can lead to statically typed Stockholm syndrome.

Roman, known better online as effectfully, is interviewed by Wouter and Joachim. On his path to becoming a Plutus language developer at IOG, he learned English to read Software Foundations, has encountered many spaceleaks, and used Haskell to prevent robots from killing people.

In this episode, András Kovács is being interviewed by Andres Löh and Matthias Pall Gissurarson. We learn how to go from economics to functional programming, how GHC's runtime system is superior to Rust's, the importance of looking at GHC's Core for spotting stray closures, and why staging might be the answer to all your optimisation problems.

Wouter and Niki interview Jose Calderon, the new Executive Director of the Haskell Foundation. Jose tells why he applied for the job, how he sees the foundation developing over the coming years, and how you can get involved in the Haskell community.

In this episode, Wouter and Andres interview Ivan Perez, a senior research scientist at NASA. Ivan tells us about how NASA uses Haskell to develop the Copilot embedded domain specific language for runtime verification, together with some of the obstacles he encounters getting to end users to learn Haskell and adopt such an EDSL.

Jezen Thomas is co-founder and CTO of Supercede, a company applying Haskell in the reinsurance industry. In this episode, Jezen, Wouter and Joachim talk about his experience using Haskell in industry, growing a diverse and remote team of developers, and starting a company to create your own Haskell job.

Today, Matthías and Joachim are interviewing Moritz Angermann. Moritz knew he wanted to use Haskell before he knew Haskell, fixed cross-compilation as his first GHC contribution. We’ll talk more about cross-compilation to Windows and mobile platforms, why Template Haskell is the cause of most headaches, why you should be careful if your sister calls and tells you to cabal install a package, and finally how we can reduce the fear of new GHC releases, by improving stability.

In this episode, Andres and Matti talk to Mike Sperber, CEO of Active Group in Germany. They discuss how to successfully develop an application based on deep learning in Haskell, contrast learning by example with the German bureaucratic approach, and highlight the virtues of having fewer changes in the language.

In this episode, we are joined by Rebecca Skinner. She talks about her new book, Effective Haskell, which takes you from list manipulation to thunks to type-level programming. She also tells us about large scale industrial applications in Haskell, and how the architecture is shaped by the organization of the engineering teams. Disclaimer: Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC.

Andres and Wouter interview Edwin Brady, most famous for his work on the Idris programming language. We talk about how he got interested in programming with dependent types, his thoughts on dependently typed programming in Haskell, and his vision for Idris.

Joachim Breitner and David Thrane Christiansen interview John MacFarlane, a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, but also the author of the popular pandoc document conversion tool, which has been around half as long as Haskell itself. He also explains the principle of uniformity as a design goal for lightweight markup languages, the relationship between philosophy and programming, and along the way he helps David with his markdown difficulties.

In this episode, Matti and Wouter are joined by John Hughes. John is one of the authors of the original Haskell Report and talks about why functional programming matters, the origins of QuickCheck testing, and how higher order functions and lazy evaluation is the key that makes functional programming so productive, and so much fun!

Wouter and Niki are joined by Iavor Diatchki to talk about his experience with different Haskell development styles, writing a high assurance wiki in php, and maintaining Haskell code across different GHC releases over multiple decades.

In this episode Niki Vazou and Wouter Swierstra chat with Lindsey Kuper, Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz. They discuss what to do when your data center gets hit by a tornado, life in academia versus life in industry, and what is choreographic programming.

In this farewell interview with David Thrane Christiansen, the outgoing Executive Director of the Haskell Foundation, hosts Wouter Swierstra and Matthías Páll Gissurarson use the opportunity to reflect on his tenure as ED, the recent history of the Haskell Foundation, where the HF is going and what consider if you want to apply for the role of Executive Director of the HF.

This episode’s guest is Ranjit Jhala. We discuss how Ranjit developed Liquid Haskell as a litmus test, because if Haskell programmer’s won’t use Liquid Types, no one will. We also hear how writing Haskell is a joy and how you should never underestimate your students.

Arnaud Spiwack is interviewed by Matthías Páll Gissurarson and Joachim Breitner. We learn all about linear types in Haskell, how linear types go beyond Rust’s ownership system and why it’s not always best to type check everything in core. We conclude with a peek into the many activities of Arnaud’s employer, Tweag.

In this episode, Bartosz Milewski is interviewed by Wouter Swierstra and Andres Löh. Bartosz shares his thoughts on the "fringe topics" in programming, from C++ templates to category theory in Haskell. How he considers monads to be like fingers sticking out of the water. And he'll talk a little bit about his upcoming book and his thoughts on linear types.

Joachim Breitner went to ZuriHac 2023 in order to bring the spirit of the biggest Haskell community event to you. He talks to Farhad Mehta, Tomáš Janoušek, Christian Georgii, David Christiansen, Artin Ghasivand, Hannes Siebenhandl, Michael Peyton Jones and Ben Lynn.