Simon Peyton Jones

There's a quote from Pat Helen's talk that I think you also, a paper which I think you also looked at or read.

So it says, programming with values changes everything about the way you think about programming.

It's just...

mind-changing.

It's not necessarily better, but it is different.

And so Haskell takes that idea and runs with it.

Everything is driven by that one idea.

Everything else is incidental.

In the early days, that meant we just said, well, guys, suck it up.

We'll keep changing the language.

And if it breaks your programs, too bad.

So it is a bit peculiar.

And therefore, also, it felt a bit academic because initially it was really not very powerful.

It was taking the key idea, but you couldn't do very much with it.

We talked about that, right?

Over time, GHC and Haskell in general has become more and more powerful.

The type system has become less and less in your way and more and more useful.

All the obstacles that make functional programming hard have become better.

The compiler generates faster code, it can browse faster and so forth.

So it has become less, if you like, peculiar.