Simon Peyton-Jones: Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey

What people said

modernerd · 2019-10 · Strong recommendation

Yes, I didn't include the papers below in my parent response because, “just read these dense academic papers to understand what monads are and why Haskell has them” doesn't tend to be good advice for Haskell beginners. But learning why monads came to be included in Haskell is useful if you want to dive deeper into this stuff: Philip Wadler's original 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: [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/output. A Haskell program was simply a function from string to string. That was what it was. … But this was a bit embarrassing…” He goes on to talk about other ideas they explored to create effects, why they settled on monads, and why he wishes now they had called them something like “workflows” (as F# later did[1]) to make them sound less intimidating. (Simon and Philip will both be at Haskell Exchange 2019 in London this coming week if anyone else,

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ddellacosta · 2024-08 · Recommendation

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." [VIDEO] This talk is seven years old btw. Caring about industry users in Haskell is not new.

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Tarean · 2018-09 · Recommendation

> 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 [VIDEO]

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