Lennart Augustsson
On Jan 29, 2007, at 03:01 , Alexy Khrabrov wrote:
How do people stumble on Haskell?
Well, I didn't really stumble on it. I was at the 1987 meeting when we decided to define Haskell.
But I stumbled on functional programming in the first place. I had to learn it because it was part of a course in denotational semantics.
OK, if we old lags are going to give our excuses... I was a member of an undergraduate society in Cambridge called the Processor Group. I went along to a talk that Arthur Norman gave to them (must have been 1980±1?) in which he described (S, K, I) combinators and his plans for the SKI Machine (SKIM). The fact that S and K on their own gave a complete computational basis was the most exciting piece of computer science I'd encountered at that point and I just had to follow it up. So some years later I ended up at that same 1987 meeting. -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk