Haskell Interlude: Episode 22 – Alejandro Russo

#1

Andres Löh and Niki Vazou talk with Alejandro Russo. Alejandro is a professor at Chalmers University in Gothenburg Sweden, he is an enthusiastic functional programmer as well as a researcher in the fields of security and privacy. He talks about the unique strengths Haskell has in these areas and how to move research ideas into industry.

While I am at it, I’d like to invite our listeners to feel free to give us some feedback! In particular, I wonder:

  • How do you like the podcast?
  • Do you usually listen to all episodes, or just selected ones.
  • Do you want more technical content, or more about the humans behind the tech?
  • Is the length of the episodes good? Too long? Too short?
  • What topics are underrepresented?
  • What else is on your mind?
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#2

I generally like the content, in particular:

  • The main question about how the interviewee got interested in Haskell.
  • Some technical discussion on e.g. Safe Haskell in this episode.
  • I’m personally interested in people’s careers (in industry or academia), because I might want to take a similar path or learn from the problems they encountered.
  • The final question on what the interviewee would like to change about Haskell. Whether it is technical or social.

I think the length of the episodes is good.

I do notice a lack of mentions of category theory in the podcast. Maybe it is possible to interview Edward Kmett, Bartosz Milewski, or Conal Elliot? Of course this should not become the main focus of this podcast, but I think having no mention of category theory at all is also unbalanced.

As for other things on my mind, I’m thinking that the podcasts up to now have been very broad about anything the interviewee has done or is interested in. I thought it may also be interesting to have some episodes that focus more in depth on specific projects. For example:

  • Pandoc with John MacFarlane
  • Helium with Jurriaan Hage
  • Dependent Haskell with Richard Eisenberg/Stephanie Weirich/Vladislav Zavialov
  • Yesod with Michael Snoyman

It is a shame HCAR has stopped, otherwise you could just pick a project at random from there (I got some of the above suggestions from looking at HCAR 2018).

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#3

I’m working on restarting it this year. Apologies for the hiatus, personal matters made me delay publishing last edition for longer and longer.

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#4

I like the podcast. I usually listen to all episodes.
As far as content goes, I welcome both technical content (e.g. what’s going on in GHC development? What challenges are Haskell-using companies facing?) and humans behind tech are interesting to me (both “famous” as well as maybe not-so-well known enthusiasts, academics, authors of libraries etc.).
I’d say the length of the episodes is just right and the hosts are doing good job of interviewing.

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