Abstract

Haskell is my first baby, born slightly before my son Michael, who is now in his mid-20s. From somewhat academic beginnings as a remorselessly pure functional programming language, Haskell has evolved into a practical tool used for real applications and, amazingly, is still in a state of furious innovation.

In this talk I’ll discuss Haskell’s birth and evolution, including some of the research and engineering challenges we faced in design and implementation. I’ll focus particularly on the ideas that have turned out, in retrospect, to be most important and influential, as well as sketching some current developments and making some wild guesses about the future.

It has been a long journey, but it starts at Trinity College, where I was a maths undergraduate, and Arthur Norman first introduced me to the joy and beauty of functional programming