Simon Peyton-Jones: Towards a Programming Language Nirvana

Posted By: Charles | Jul 19th, 2007 @ 10:55 AM | 33,696 Views | 19 Comments

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While in Cambridge, England recently for the MSR Cambridge 10 year anniversary and MSR Cambridge PhD Summer School (stay tuned for coverage on this on Channel 8...) I caught up with Simon Peyton-Jones, Erik Meijer and, very briefly (too briefly), Butler Lampson to talk about what's going on inside Simon's head right now with respect to general purpose programming language evolution.

Trust me, it's most interesting and programmers should be excited about the thoughts in Simon's head these days. Join us for a really brief conversation (I think this is my shortest interview in the 3+ years I've been taking part in conversations here on Channel 9) with some of programming language design's best and brightest. Here, Simon clues us in to the nirvana of programming languages: Safe and Useful (effectful). Better just to listen in to Simon's excellent and succinct explanation of the holy grail of general purpose programming languages.

Enjoy!

PS I will be interviewing Butler Lampson sometime in the future (when he's in Redmond). He's a rather prominent computer scientist with a rich history in making systems that many of us rely on for a number of things...

Tags: MS Research, Programming

Rating:

Escamillo

Thanks for this video.
I love listening to programming language gurus. Smiley

RoyalSchrubber
One. How many time travellers does it take to change a lightbulb?

awesome

Heh, coincidentally just two days ago I became interested in Haskell - and GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) in particular. I think I'm going to learn it someday when I have more free time.
It's great to see the man behind GHC that has made a lot of work for it. Wish you luck.

Big Smile

dot_tom

Wonderful video Charles, but no fair, it's way to short! Smiley

Can we please get Simon back on C9 soon. I read his "Beautiful Concurrency" paper again recently and was struck again by what a great brain / communicator he is (as well as possessing a very sly sense of humour). More Simon...

Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

Wow, thats very cool. Just way too short! I wanted to hear more Sad

Good interview.

raymond
Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness, Truth and Wisdom

Great Teaser!

More please.

Cool

sylvan

Yes, more SPJ please!

Charles
Welcome Change

This conversation really just "happened" in the sense that it was entirely unplanned... This is why we got cut off - the geniuses were only gathered there because they happened to be getting ready to walk around a poster session and evaluate the content and delivery of the students standing next to their posters for a "competition" of sorts.

I will try to get more time with Simon. Since he's in Cambridge most of the time, it probably won't be soon, though I do know he's going to a conference not too far from Seattle sometime soon.... I will need to look into this.

Short though this interview is, it's in fact crammed with very valuable insights and information.

C

esoteric
λ

Brilliant! More of this please. Interesting perspectives, not just bla bla bla. Smiley

sylvan

Charles wrote:

I will try to get more time with Simon. Since he's in Cambridge most of the time, it probably won't be soon, though I do know he's going to a conference not too far from Seattle sometime soon.... I will need to look into this.

Yes, he's going to have a few tutorials and talks at OSCON in Portland which takes place July 23-27, so you best hurry if you want to make arrangements for anything related to that!
According to their website his last talk is on the 25th. Maybe you could invite him up to Seattle after that? Or arrange a road trip Smiley

I'd love to hear more talk on general programming languages trends and theory, but also more on the concurrency problem that we face in the future.