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 lose your job” was specially meant to encourage to quit jobs that are not good for you, if possible, but he acknowledges that unfortunately not everybody can afford that risk.

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 the languages with which they work.

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 hopes that Software Engineering could be less like alchemy.

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 Certification.

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 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 Thrane Christiansen, Artin Ghasivand, Hannes Siebenhandl, Michael Peyton Jones and Ben Lynn.

In this episode Niki Vazou and Mattias Pall chat with Richard Eisenberg. Richard is currently a language designer at Jane Street, he is the chair of the board at the Haskell Foundation and known for his work on the GHC compiler. Today we talk about dependent types in Haskell, how to get involved with GHC and Haskell foundation and how Haskell and Ocaml are different, for example, functor means a totally different thing in the two languages.

In this episode Christiaan Baaij is interviewed by Wouter Swierstra and Mattias Páll. Christiaan talks about his work on the Clash compiler, what it is like to found your own company, his desire for ergonomic dependent types, and the foundations to all his success, namely capitalising on luck.

Errata: Around the 21m19s mark Christiaan talks about “his“ contributions to GHC with regards to dynamic linking on OSX. Later he remembered that it was actually Moritz Angermann who worked on the symbol limit restrictions. However, Christiaan did some other work on OSX linking and some of the RPATH handling.

In this episode Simon Marlow talks with Andres Löh and Matthias Pall. Simon is a long time GHC contributor, currently working at Meta. He talks about compiling functional languages via C and the Evil Mangler, the importance of using parallelism and its impact on garbage collection, and about using Haskell in the real world via Sigma, Haxl, and Glean.

In this episode Joachim Breitner and Wouter Swierstra talk to Andrew Lelechenko, also known as Bodigrim. Bodigrim went from a being a mathematician to a failed PHP developer the chair of the Core Libraries Committee. In this episode, we discuss whether he prefers number theory or Haskell, whether he prefers working with compilers or PHP frameworks, and whether he prefers high salaries for Haskell developers or breaking changes to the base library.

In this episode Andres Löh and Niki Vazou chat with Jeremy Gibbons. Jeremy Gibbons is professor at Oxford and talks about his journey from Orwell to Haskell, how to teach Haskell and specification languages to undergraduates as well as professional programmers, how programming languages should keep simple things simple, and how paper writing can or even should be like poetry.

In this episode Wouter Swierstra and Joachim Breitner chat with Ben Gamari. Ben is a consultant at Well-Typed known for his work at GHC. Ben tells us a little bit about his switch from Python to Haskell but not because he was missing the static typing, how programming his thermostat lead him to a career in the compiler development, and what it’s like to be a GHC force multiplier.

In this episode Andres Löh and Niki Vazou talk with Alejandro Russo. Alejandro is a professor at Chalmers University in Gothenburg Sweden, he is an enthusiastic functional programmer as well as a researcher in the fields of security and privacy. He talks about the unique strengths Haskell has in these areas and how to move research ideas into industry.

In this episode Matthías Páll and Andres Löh talk with Andrey Mokhov. Andrey is best known for his work on the Hadrian build system and today he talks about algebraic graphs, selective functors, and the difference between OCaml and Haskell.

In this episode Jesper Cockx, one of the main Agda developers, is interviewed by Niki Vazou and Matthias Pall. They talk about how to explain dependent types to one’s father, how Agda’s automation and proof search work, and how Agda can be used to verify Haskell code bases.

In this episode Marc Scholten is interviewed by Andres Löh and Joachim Breitner. They talk about the Integrated Haskell Platform web framework (IHP), implicit parameters and nix.

In this episode Matthias Pall Gissurarson & Jimmy Koppel are interviewed by Wouter Swierstra and Niki Vazou. They talk about program synthesis, typed holes, program repair, and generating properties using a new technique called ECTAs.

Ningning Xie is interviewed by Niki Vazou and Andres Loh. Ningning first contributed to GHC at her Google summer of code project with a very ambitious goal of implementing the whole dependent Haskell. Also later she fixed several ghc bugs and worked on Koka’s Algebraic effects. Her future hope and advice is to use programming language concepts on real-word problems.

Oskar Wickström is interviewed by Wouter Swierstra and Alejandro Serrano, he will tell us a little bit about property-based testing (PBT) Haskell code but also applying these ideas to the testing of complete systems. He will say a little bit about interfacing Haskell to other languages and even with your web browser and what it’s like to learn Rust as a Haskell programmer.

Facundo Dominguez is interviewed by Niki Vazou and Joachim Breitner. Facundo Dominguez tells us the difference between STM and SMT. We also talk about Liquid Haskell and its relation to dependent types and the QualifiedDo extension – which is one of the most highly discussed GHC proposals – and the general GHC proposals. And, finally, Facundo describes a technique to have Haskell peacefully coexist with other languages thanks to his work in the build system Bazel.

Ryan Trinkle is interviewed by Joachim Breitner and Niki Vazou. Ryan Trinkle co-founded Obsidian Systems, a company that uses not only Haskell but also even more exotic tech such as Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) and Nix. Ryan shed some light on the business side of Haskell and we get to hear that hiring for Haskell is actually excellent.

David Christiansen is interviewed by Alejandro Serrano and Wouter Swierstra. They talk about many functional programming things, from Idris to Racket and of course Haskell and David’s new role as the executive director of Haskell Foundation.

Gergő Érdi is interviewed by Wouter Swierstra and Andres Löh. Gergő has an interesting path into Haskell taking many twists and turns. This episode discusses about these twists and Gergő’s recent book on implementing retro computers using Haskell.

Simon Peyton Jones is interviewed by Andres Löh and Joachim Breitner. Simon is the creator of Haskell and in this episode he talks about his new position at Epic, the origins of Haskell and why “it feels right”, and the (extra)ordinary Haskell programmers.

Nadia Polikarpova is interviewed by Alejandro Serrano and Niki Vazou. Nadia is an assistant professor at UCSD, where she works on improving how we write programs. They talk about some of her projects, like Hoogle+ and Synquid, and how she approaches teaching about these topics.

Sebastian Graf is interviewed by Joachim Breitner and Alejandro Serrano. Sebastian is one of the most active contributors to GHC, and tells of this experience, from his very first commit to GHC to his current work on the pattern coverage checker and demand analyzer. He also gives us hints on how to reason about the strictness of Haskell programs.

Niki Vazou and Andres Löh are joined by guest Théophile Choutri (they/them), who also goes by Hécate. Théophile coordinates multiple projects and volunteer groups within the Haskell Foundation, notably the Haskell School project (intending to provide a free online open source library for teaching Haskell), and works on improving GHC core documentation and developing an alternative to Hackage. Together they discuss Théophile’s introduction to Haskell and their ongoing projects with the Foundation and the broader community, with a focus on the challenges facing Haskell non-experts and how they hope to tackle them.

José Calderón is interviewed by Niki Vazou and Wouter Swierstra . José has been working on functional programming at Galois and University of Maryland. He tells us about his research background in many different continents, his experience with teaching compilers, the relation between music and functional programming and the “Recursive Programming Techniques” book that in the 1970s captured the essence of functional programming.

Graham Hutton is interviewed by Wouter Swierstra and Andres Löh. Graham is known for his work on Haskell both in research and teaching Haskell, and in particular his Haskell book. Graham will tell us a little bit about how his book came about and give us advice for how to write a book ourselves, but also look back on his experience using Haskell and teaching Haskell in the last thirty years, and tell us a little bit about how bad the compile times were for the very first versions of GHC.

Chris Smith is interviewed by Joachim Breitner and Andres Löh. Chris is the author of the CodeWorld teaching tool and discusses why too much curry in the language can make error messages hard to digest and why a self respecting testing library certainly should be used to test itself.

Jasper Van der Jeugt is interviewed by Niki Vazou and Joachim Breitner. Jasper plays an important role in the Haskell community, helping with haskell.org, the Google Summer of Code project, ZuriHac and the ICFP programming contest, so there is much to talk about.

Gabriella Gonzalez is interviewed by Joachim Breitner and Alejandro Serrano, and we talk about Dhall, Nix, and Haskell, learn why Gabriella’s packages are sometimes called after characters of computer games, and get to know her elevator pitch for educating Haskell

The interviewee now goes by Gabriella as their preferred name, but at the time was still using Gabriel.

The guest in our second episode is Lennart Augustsson. The hosts are Wouter Swierstra and Niki Vazou. We talk about Lennart’s long history with Haskell, about the various jobs he has had, all the compilers he has written, and about dependent types.

The guest of our first regular episode is Emily Pillmore, CTO of the Haskell Foundation. The hosts are Alejandro Serrano and Andres Löh. We talk about Emily’s path to Haskell, the role of the Haskell Foundation and the CTO within the Haskell Foundation, about current projects, the Haskell Community and about Emily’s work on Optics.

We are starting a new Haskell-focused podcast where we interview guests from the Haskell community. The hosts are Niki Vazou, Joachim Breitner, Andres Löh, Alejandro Serrano and Wouter Swierstra. In this teaser episode, we introduce ourselves.