Co-Creator of Haskell: Functional Programming, Thinking in Types, Useless Languages | Simon Jones

Co-Creator of Haskell: Functional Programming, Thinking in Types, Useless Languages | Simon Jones

From The Peterman Pod by Ryan Peterman

June 8, 2026 · 1h 28m

About this episode

Ryan Peterman interviews Simon Peyton Jones about functional programming and the Haskell language.

Simon Peyton Jones is the co-creator of Haskell (pure functional programming language) and I interviewed him about functional programming, why it matters, and his thoughts on other programming languages. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ Podcast links: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/xcB_LF3cdqw • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/co-creator-of-haskell-functional Thank you to this episode's sponsor for supporting my work: • WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/ Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:39) What functional programming is (09:18) Downsides of functional programming (10:53) Specialized hardware for functional programming (21:47) Haskell is useless (25:59) Rust vs C (28:26) Haskell vs OCaml (35:26) Side effects in Haskell (44:26) Type systems (57:30) How the Haskell compiler works (01:04:35) Why Haskell is talked about more than used (01:09:07) Avoiding success at all costs (01:11:12) LLMs and programming languages…

People in this episode

Host: Ryan Peterman

Guest: Simon Peyton Jones

Topics covered

  • functional programming
  • Haskell
  • programming languages
  • type systems
  • software development

Keywords

  • Haskell
  • functional programming
  • programming languages
  • type systems
  • Rust
  • C
  • OCaml
  • Excel

Sponsors

WorkOS

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Haskell, Rust, OCaml, Excel, LinkedIn, Wikipedia

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