This episode is a deep dive into the evolution of Haskell and functional programming with one of its pioneers, Lennart Augustson. It  reflects on decades of work in language design and compiler implementation. Lennart speaks about his early involvement in the creation of Haskell, shares thoughts on type systems, performance, and the balance between purity and practicality. The conversation ranges from personal history to big-picture views on the evolution of programming languages, with plenty of insight into what makes Haskell both powerful and challenging. A rare opportunity to hear from one of the foundational voices in the functional programming world.

In this Interlude, we’re joined by Jean-Philipe Bernardy, a Senior Lecturer at University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology. We discuss letting types be your guide, getting into AI to feed yourself, and never testing your programs.

In this episode, we talk to Manuel Chakravarty - specifically, his work on the ghc backend such as data-parallel Haskell and the FFI  and how that work segued into type system design. We also discussed Manuel's perspective on Haskell from the language design of Swift.

Stefan Wehr is a professor at the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences. Before becoming a professor, Stefan worked in industry on a large Haskell codebase - specifically one that's not a compiler and not a blockchain. So of course we talked about using Haskell in large projects, software architecture, modularity, type classes and data modeling and the suppression of sums outside of functional programming, and also about teaching Haskell at his current job.

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 Agda.. Phil is a fountain of great ideas and stories, and this conversation could have gone on for hours. As it is, we hope you enjoy the hour that we had as much as we did. 

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 do, too. 

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.