Tech Mesh London 2012

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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/

 

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.