In this episode, Matti and Wouter are joined by John Hughes. John is one of the authors of the original Haskell Report and talks about why functional programming matters, the origins of QuickCheck testing, and how higher order functions and lazy evaluation is the key that makes functional programming so productive, and so much fun!
Great point about Haskell seemingly becoming less and less easy to learn for beginners around 15:00. I hope some day we get a language levels system where you can start with a very simple subset and slowly expand to the full language.
@jaror Haskell 2010 is pretty simple. What do you imagine is the simpler starting point, if any? If Haskell 2010 is a good starting point, aren’t language pragmas / extensions effectively the same as your “language levels”?
Type classes are a big cause of confusion among newcomers, and even parametric polymorphism.
If you want to see how simple a language can really get you should check out Hedy: https://www.hedycode.com/. It even removes string quotes (let alone variables) at the simplest level. Although it is too imperative for my taste.
