Around 7:50 in Jones says this:<p>“So, one of the great things about Haskell actually, that is spoken about and I think it’s the sort of killer app for Haskell, is that it’s so refactorable, right? You can do a heart or lung transplant on GHC and make truly major changes and the type checker just guides you to do all the right things.”<p>Freely refactoring the code with worrying about unit tests, etc seems quite appealing.<p>To summarize the killer app for Haskell is that “it’s so refactorable”
> JB: So is it refreshing to to work on an implementation of a language from scratch after having worked on this 20-30 years old codebase in GHC and all this big beast where you can’t just redo everything from scratch?<p>> SPJ: It’s a very different prospectus because in this case Verse is a pretty well-formed beast in Tim’s head. If we want to do something different we’re going to have to persuade him but I’m fine with that, right? But the dynamic is that he’s a sort of technical lead on the project – which is very unusual for the CEO of a multibillion dollar company and actually quite rewarding.<p>Quite unusual and very cool!
It's interesting he discusses Liquid Haskell (proofs via refinement types) extensively:<p><i>"So, for me, that’s as far as increasing our ability to give you statically guaranteed theorems about Haskell programs.<p>My money’s on Liquid Haskell at the moment and I hope that we the Haskell community"</i><p>My experience is that other refinement type systems are way less complex. See: <a href="https://github.com/hwayne/lets-prove-leftpad" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hwayne/lets-prove-leftpad</a><p>In particular, compare <a href="https://github.com/hwayne/lets-prove-leftpad/blob/master/liquidhaskell/LeftPad.hs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hwayne/lets-prove-leftpad/blob/master/liq...</a> to <a href="https://github.com/hwayne/lets-prove-leftpad/blob/master/dafny/Leftpad.dfy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hwayne/lets-prove-leftpad/blob/master/daf...</a><p>For me this has been a bit of a disappointment.
Any tips on other professors like SPJ? He seems like a super human even after the 10 years Ive followed him. Never angry, always happy, always engaged, always teaching things with depth, not dumbing things down to make it easier, not pandering…
Why is Haskell, a comparatively obscure language (to Python, C++, etc.), so popular with topics in the orbit of "web3" (blockchain, crypto, metaverse, etc.)?