interview

Simon Peyton Jones, coauthor of GHC, on types as APIs, Haskell intermediate language, 30k cores parallelism, Erlang as a Haskell library, CS education for kids, Google Dart, and more.

"I sometimes run a very old version of The Sims to optimize living conditions for two people with busy lives who want to achieve maximum happiness and self actualization. [...] Turns out that an errant chair or a table configuration might cause undue friction and, over time, decrease joy and happiness. [...] It's kind of my version of debugging life, and it's another reason why I have a PC lying around. I don't play the game unless I'm trying to figure out a more optimal living condition. I don't use this religiously by any means, but as more of thought experiment."

"Powerful tools can be powerfully abused, but that doesn't mean I don't want them!"

"We're delighted when people who can't afford our books don't pay us for them, if they go out and do something useful with that information."