The Haskell Interlude

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...

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...

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...

In this episode Tom Sydney is chatting with Matti Paul and Niki Vazou. Tom is the author of many tools, like sydtest, decking, and nix-ci. He tells us about the rules for sustainable Haskell, how Haskell lets one man do the job of 50, and the secret sauce for open source. Tom Sydney is also looking for work these days, so get in touch!

Wouter and Joachim interview Arseny Seroka, CEO of Serokell. Arseny got into Haskell because of a bet over Pizza, fell for it because it means fewer steps between his soul and his work, and founded Serokell because he could not get a Haskell job. He speaks about the business side of a Haskell company, about the need for more sales and marketing for Haskell itself, and about the Haskell Developer C...

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 fi...

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. Ban...

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...

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.