#52 Why is Haskell so special - Lennart Augustsson

Type Theory Forall

Lennart Augustsson has spent the last four decades quietly — and sometimes mischievously — shaping the way we think about code.

He co-authored Lazy ML in the early 80s, wrote A Compiler for LML back in 1984, and was behind HBC, the first publicly available Haskell compiler.

If you've used Haskell, worked with hardware described in Bluespec, or played around with weird combinator-based toy languages, there's a decent chance you've crossed paths with his ideas — directly or indirectly.

He's also won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest — not once, but multiple times — reminding us that playfulness and rigor aren't mutually exclusive.

But his work didn't stop in academia or hobby projects. He’s brought functional programming into finance, hardware design, large-scale industry — with stints at Credit Suisse, Facebook, Google, and now Epic Games, where he’s helping design a new functional logic programming language called Verse.

Over the course of this conversation, we’ll talk about lazy evaluation, type theory, programmable dungeons, the compromises of real-world programming, and what it means to still be building languages after 40 years in the game.

Links

• Type Theory Forall Merch Store
• Ko-Fi
• Discord Server
• Haskell Interlude
• Lennart's Wikipedia Page
• Lennart's Webpage