27 years ago I published Why Functional Programming Matters, a manifesto for FP–but the subject is much older than that! In this talk I’ll take a deep dive into history to revisit a personal selection of highlights, ranging from Church encodings through functional geometry to QuickCheck on a chip.
John Hughes has been a functional programming enthusiast for more than thirty years, at the Universities of Oxford, Glasgow, and since 1992 Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. He served on the Haskell design committee, co-chairing the committee for Haskell 98, and is the author of more than 75 papers, including Why Functional Programming Matters, one of the classics of the area. With Koen Claessen, he created QuickCheck, the most popular testing tool among Haskell programmers, and in 2006 he founded Quviq to commercialise the technology using Erlang.
