THE VIDEO SHELF · haskell history
Simon Peyton-Jones: Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey
Simon Peyton Jones gives Churchill College's annual computer science lecture on Haskell's birth and evolution. He covers the most influential ideas, from laziness to monads and type system evolution, plus current developments and guesses about the future.
Why HN readers recommended it
Recommended as a funny, accessible history of Haskell that is valuable even for people interested in language design in general.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Churchill College, University of Cambridge
- Topic
- haskell history
- Format
- lecture
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 5
- HN mentions in dataset
- 9
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2017–2024
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
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 …
modernerd on Hacker News · 2019-10
In Learning Haskell is no harder than learning any other programming languageSPJ also noted that the original success of haskell was due to their pursuit of laziness. Because laziness has no place in a system with side effects, their pursuit of laziness and functional programming is what led them to discover the usefulness of monads for …
arianvanp on Hacker News · 2017-06
In Rust as a gateway drug to HaskellUnsound typesystems are not necessarily a problem, but consider the problem the other way around: given a sound typesystem, how do we improve this in such a way that a) the average Joe will understand it b) it decreases the overhead of writing the types …
superice on Hacker News · 2018-04
In Are unsound type systems wrong?
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.