O'Reilly Webinar: Designing Type-Safe Haskell APIs

“Any invariant enforced by the type system is guaranteed to be correct throughout your codebase.”

Strictly speaking, this is only true of languages with sound type systems. C++ lets me enforce immutability with “const”, yet I can deliberately subvert the type system with “const_cast” if I know better than the compiler, or if I just feel like invoking undefined behaviour today.

“I strongly believe that a reason we're seeing people moving to dynamically typed languages is because the popular statically typed languages have given static typing such a bad name.”

This is my perception as well. Static typing that doesn’t actually give you any guarantees is just a nuisance. And developers are notoriously busy, and lazy—it’s only when you can conveniently apply a tool that you actually will apply it. In that regard, Haskell is excellent: it makes me type without making me type.

Just registered, and then ran the system check to make sure my Ubuntu laptop can watch the webinar:

Operating System Failed We have detected that your operating system does not meet the optimal webcast specifications for listening to and/or viewing webcasts. We recommend the following operating systems: Windows 7 or Windows XP SP2, and Mac OS X 10.4. Please note that users with older versions of Windows (Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 95), Mac, Linux, and Unix operating systems may or may not experience difficulties listening to and/or viewing webcasts. Please contact your network administrator regarding any operating system upgrades.

Surprising from O'reilly, but I guess that's an artifact of choosing Flash for this.