Tech Mesh London 2012

Presentation: "Keynote: Haskell: Practical as well as Cool"

Time: Tuesday 09:15 - 10:15 / Location: To be announced

You’ve probably heard about Haskell by now, but life is short, so why should you bother about yet another programming language? In this talk we’ll focus on three distinctive aspects of Haskell that you might make it worth the bother. First, purity: uncontrolled side effects are the bane of correctness, testing, and parallelism, and Haskell gets them under control. Second, types: going well beyond the sterile static/dynamic debate, Haskell is an amazing cauldron of new ideas in types, and we’ll tell you why that matters. Last, domain specific languages: we all need them and no language makes it easier to develop and morph a DSL than Haskell. We hope you’ll go away at least provoked and intrigued.

 

Download slides

John Hughes, Co-inventor of QuickCheck and Haskell

John Hughes

Biography: John Hughes

John Hughes has been a functional programming enthusiast for more than thirty years, at the Universities of Oxford, Glasgow, and since 1992 Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. He served on the Haskell design committee, co-chairing the committee for Haskell 98, and is the author of more than 75 papers, including "Why Functional Programming Matters", one of the classics of the area. With Koen Claessen, he created QuickCheck, the most popular testing tool among Haskell programmers, and in 2006 he founded Quviq to commercialise the technology using Erlang.

John's University Home Page
 
 

Philip Wadler, Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh

Philip Wadler

Biography: Philip Wadler

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Chair of ACM SIGPLAN, and past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship. Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, CMU, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor in Copenhagen, Sydney, and Paris. He has an h-index of 59, appears at position 269 on Citeseer's list of most-cited authors in computer science, and has a total of more than 17,500 citations to his work according to Google Scholar. He is a winner of the POPL Most Influential Paper Award. He has contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery, and is a co-author of Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice Hall, 1988), XQuery from the Experts (Addison Wesley, 2004) and Generics and Collections in Java (O'Reilly, 2006). He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich.

Simon Peyton Jones, Co-inventor of Haskell, Principal Researcher @ Microsoft

Simon Peyton Jones

Biography: Simon Peyton Jones

 

Simon Peyton Jones, MA, MBCS, CEng, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London, and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before moving to Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998.
 
His main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He has led a succession of research projects focused around the design and implementation of production-quality functional-language systems for both uniprocessors and parallel machines. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.

More generally, he is interested in language design, rich type systems, software component architectures, compiler technology, code generation, runtime systems, virtual machines, and garbage collection. He is particularly motivated by direct use of principled theory to practical language design and implementation -- that's one reason he loves functional programming so much. 
 
Software Passion:  Functional programming: beautiful, expressive, richly typed, and parallel.  What more do you want? 
 
 
Books and Software:  http://haskell.org/ghc/