u/joehillenin r/haskell • Recommends
Simon Peyton-Jones: Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey
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Simon Peyton-Jones: Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey
Churchill College, University of Cambridge
9.9K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 9 people: 5 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters, 2 in engineering communities and 1 curated list.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2024.
- Presented by Simon Peyton Jones, co-creator of Haskell
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
170K views9 years ago9 recommendations
Programming languagesHistory and cultureHaskellFunctional programmingLanguage design and type systems
Simon Peyton Jones discusses the birth, evolution, and key design decisions of Haskell, including laziness and monads.
Churchill College's annual Computer Science lecture. In this talk Simon discusses Haskell’s birth and evolution, including some of the research and engineering challenges he faced in design and implementation. Focusing particularly on the ideas that have turned out, in retrospect, to be most important and influential, as well as sketching some current developments and making some wild guesses about the future.Why it's here
9 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended for its accessible explanation of how laziness led to the adoption of monads in Haskell.
Moments people linked to
modernerdon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Learning Haskell is no harder than learning any other programming language”
…l paper on Comprehending Monads PDF: link Philip Wadler and Simon Peyton-Jones' paper on Imperative Functional Programming PDF: link Simon Peyton-Jones mentions both papers and talks about why monads came to be part of Haskell in his talk on the history of Haskell here, with examples that are a little more accessible than the above papers: link to this video introduction to purity and then monads starts around 30:07 It's a funny talk and it's worth watching in full, but here's a nice soundbite: “So what did we do for IO? Well, we just didn't have any. audience laughs So the joy of being an academic, right, is you can design a language — in 1990, I beg to inform you — that had no input/outpu…
programming-talkscurated list on GitHubRecommends
Under “Haskell”
Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey 01:04:15 by **Simon Peyton-Jones** (2017)
andycon Lobsters • Recommends
Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey (2017)
arianvanpon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell”
SPJ also noted that the original success of haskell was due to their pursuit of laziness. Because laziness has no place in a system with side effects, their pursuit of laziness and functional programming is what led them to discover the usefulness of monads for describing it in the first place. If they were pursuing a strict language instead, then they were allowed to take shortcuts, because sneaking in side effects is a lot easier. YEs maybe the next haskell will be strict, but getting to the point to make that decision required laziness. SPJ made a great lecture about this. It is very easy to follow and a fun insight into the academic history of modern functional languages link to this video
supericeon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Are unsound type systems wrong?”
…necessarily a problem, but consider the problem the other way around: given a sound typesystem, how do we improve this in such a way that a) the average Joe will understand it b) it decreases the overhead of writing the types c) the type system helps the programmer write better programs Haskells approach to this keeps the constraint of soundness: link to this video The whole video is very interesting even if you know nothing about Haskell, but are just interested in language design in general. To summarize the part of the video I just linked: Their approach so far has been to try and design the type system in such a way that you reduce programmer pain while not sacrificing soundness at all. It is a pa…
Tareanon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why I never finish my Haskell programs”
> I'm from Microsoft and when you see Microsoft documentation it often says, you know, x y or z is a rich something, right. In this case Haskell - or ghc's version of haskell is a rich language. What does this mean? Sounds good, doesn't it? But it always means this, right. That it's a large, complex, poorly understood, ill documented thing that nobody understands completely. From a great talk by Simon Peyton Jones link to this video
ddellacostaon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why does everyone hate Haskell, jazz, and pure math?”
Also, it's worth watching a bit of this talk (link at a particularly relevant time to start) because while Haskell is an "ivory-tower language," it is not _just_ an ivory tower language, and the people working on it are very much not just "a merry bunch of category theorists who had little interest in software engineering." link to this video This talk is seven years old btw. Caring about industry users in Haskell is not new.
u/oilshellin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends
Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey (2017)
u/vanderZwanin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions
On “Beyond Opinionated: Announcing The First Actually Bigoted Language”
Just sharing this in case OP is looking for more inspiration: there was a time where a released version of the Haskell compiler would *delete your source-file* if it contained a type error (and was running on Windows, and the source file was in a different directory).
Which is hilarious enough by itself, but the *best* part of this story is that Haskell programmers were so used to things breaking that the bug reports were almost apologetic for pointing out that this was an inconvenience.
Source: Simon Peyton-Jones himself in this contalk link to this video
u/Ihr_Todeswunschin r/haskell • Mentions
Functional Computer Architectures
This isn’t directly Haskell related, but this subreddit still seems to be the best place to ask it. I also realize that I could be grossly over simplifying/misunderstanding things, so if I made any mistakes, then please correct me.
In this video, at 9:30, Simon Peyton Jones says that building a new functional computer architecture turned out to be a bad idea. He then says that he’ll come back to that point. Then at 10:06, he says that the functional architectures were mostly doomed to fail compared to the power of Intel, so they abandoned functional architectures instead to write compilers.
I did some Google searching and couldn’t find anything on funct…
u/theindigamerin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions
On “Brian Kernighan on successful language design”
Well, you're in luck :) This one comes kinda' close: link to this video
Edit: Jump to around 23:00 for some of the most funny bits.
u/wsppanin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions
On “What are some cool/wierd features of a programming language you know?”
I am very familiar with Simon Peyton Jones. I especially loved his Escape From The Ivory Tower: The Haskell Journey and Shaping Our Children's Education In Computing
Interestingly, my introduction to FP languages came indirectly from Raku. I was so super excited by the announcement of Perl6 oh so long ago. I voraciously followed its progress. Early on, I came across Pugs as a functioning interpreter/compiler for Perl6. I was intrigued and needed to learn more. This lead me down a major rabbit hole in the study of FP and then programming languages in general I have yet to emerge from. I lost interest in Perl6 about 5 yrs into its development and was only since 2019 did I dare give it…
pronon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Principles of TLA+”
> An example is not being able to prove the termination of executing arbitrary programs The theorem states that you cannot prove a program's termination any faster than running it. You're not violating any theorems. > So, Im wanting it peer reviewed. But it has been peer reviewed. Here is the publication link in this journal link > So, such methods should allow us to achieve the same amount of complexity going upward using same abstraction and shortcut techniques. First, I think you're misinterpreting (and exaggerating) what has actually been achieved. Looking at Hyper-V1, 30KLOC of (preexisting and tested) C code have been verified in a year (out of a total of just 100KLOC), but only…
zengidon Hacker News • Mentions
On “John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]”
The thing that's interesting about Haskell is that lazyness had a payoff of leading to the discovery of monad-based IO 1. 1 link to this video
Ace17on Hacker News • Mentions
On “D as a Better C”
That's not so simple, because large adoption at a too early stage causes the language definition to freeze before it reaches maturity. Simon Peyton-Jones from the Haskell community explaining exactly that: "What happens if a language become successful too quickly? You can't change anything!" link to this video