Conal Elliott's guest appearances

Conal Elliott

The Haskell Cast

Type Theory Forall

John Wiegley

Richard Eisenberg

Don Stewart

Chris Jenkins

Neil Mitchell

Ollie Charles

Brent Yorgey

Simon Marlow

Gabriel Gonzalez

Michael Snoyman

Chris Done

Austin Seipp

Edward Kmett

Yves Bertot

Anupam Das

OwlTail

In this episode I had the pleasure to have an in-depth conversation with ConalElliott about his life, his work, his philosophy and his many opinions aboutresearch and the current state of PL Research and how it lead him to come withthe concept of Denotational Design. Conal got his PhD at CMU in the 90s underFrank Pfenning working on Higher-Order Unification, after that he has devotedhis life on thinking and refining graphic computation and the tools behind it. Links  Conal’s website Conal’s twitter: @conal The simple essence of automatic differentiation Compiling to categories Generic parallel functional programming Denotational design with type class morphisms Functional Images Functional Reactive Animation Alphabet Versus the Goddess - Leonard Shlain The information - James Gleick Murray Gell-Mann’s definition of beauty/elegance: “A theory appears beautiful or elegant […] when it’s simple; in other words when it can be expressed very concisely in terms of mathematics that we’ve already learned for some other reasons.” A John Backus quote (from his Turing Award lecture): “Many creative computer scientists have retreated from inventing languages to inventing tools for describing them. Unfortunately, they have been largely content to apply their elegant new tools to studying the warts and moles of existing languages. After examining the appalling type structure of conventional languages, using the elegant tools developed by Dana Scott, it is surprising that so many of us remain passively content with that structure instead of energetically searching for new ones.”

<p>In this episode I had the pleasure to have an in-depth conversation with Conal<br>Elliott about his life, his work, his philosophy and his many opinions about<br>research and the current state of PL Research and how it lead him to come with<br>the concept of Denotational Design. Conal got his PhD at CMU in the 90s under<br>Frank Pfenning working on Higher-Order Unification, after that he has devoted<br>his life on thinking and refining graphic computation and the tools behind it.</p> <h1>Links</h1> <ul> <li><a href="http://conal.net/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Conal’s website</a></li> <li>Conal’s twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/conal" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@conal</a></li> <li><a href="http://conal.net/papers/essence-of-ad/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The simple essence of automatic differentiation</a></li> <li><a href="http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Compiling to categories</a></li> <li><a href="http://conal.net/papers/generic-parallel-functional/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Generic parallel functional programming</a></li> <li><a href="http://conal.net/papers/type-class-morphisms" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Denotational design with type class morphisms</a></li> <li><a href="http://conal.net/papers/functional-images/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Functional Images</a></li> <li><a href="http://conal.net/papers/icfp97/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Functional Reactive Animation</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Alphabet-Versus-Goddess-Conflict-Between/dp/0140196013" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Alphabet Versus the Goddess - Leonard Shlain</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1400096235" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The information - James Gleick</a></li> <li>Murray Gell-Mann’s definition of beauty/elegance: “A theory appears beautiful or elegant […] when it’s simple; in other words when it can be expressed very concisely in terms of mathematics that we’ve already learned for some other reasons.”</li> <li>A John Backus quote (from his <a href="https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/backus_0703524.cfm" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Turing Award lecture</a>): “Many creative computer scientists have retreated from inventing languages to inventing tools for describing them. Unfortunately, they have been largely content to apply their elegant new tools to studying the warts and moles of existing languages. After examining the appalling type structure of conventional languages, using the elegant tools developed by Dana Scott, it is surprising that so many of us remain passively content with that structure instead of energetically searching for new ones.”</li></ul>

#17 The Lost Elegance of Computation - Conal Elliott

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.

<p>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.</p>

Episode 9 - Conal Elliott on FRP and Denotational Design