The Haskell Cast

Conal Elliott, inventor of Functional Reactive Programming, tells us about the birth of FRP as well as other stories from his 30+ years of functional programming experience. He shares what he considers the fundamentals of FRP (behaviors and events) and how they work in a model with continuous time. We speak about FRP practicality and efficiency, including how a continuous time model can help lead to a high performance implementation. Eventually we’re led into Denotational Design, which plays a part in the design and refinement of FRP and which Conal considers his simplest and clearest design tool.

Finally, Conal gives us a teaser of his work at Tabula compiling Haskell to hardware (e.g. FPGAs).

Links from the show:

• http://conal.net/
• http://conal.net/papers/siggraph94.pdf
• http://conal.net/papers/push-pull-frp/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denotational_semantics
• http://conal.net/papers/bridges2001/
• https://github.com/conal/talk-2014-bayhac-denotational-design/blob/master/README.md
• http://conal.net/papers/type-class-morphisms/

The music used in the show is Ecstatic Wave by Jens Killstofte.