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

The Peterman Pod

Jun 08, 2026•1 hr 28 min

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Episode description

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