Holding On and Letting Go
caringbridge.org
caringbridge.org
The submitted title was "Paul Hudak is dead". If someone confirms that Paul Hudak has died, we can make the title say so. This article says only that he is near death. How tasteless to jump the gun.
Edit: This little article deserves to be read and re-read on its own terms. It's so specifically about this moment—the prolonged transition. It's beautiful and heartbreaking and a true gift of love, shared with everyone. I don't think I've ever read anything like it, especially the second paragraph. Thank you, Cristina.
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/hudak/SOE/ https://github.com/Euterpea/Euterpea
I get it. Sometimes, I forget not everybody knows my heroes. Personally speaking, I think Paul Hudak is worthy of broader recognition given his contributions to the functional programming community.
As a web developer, I'm sure you've read or worked with something based on Reactive Programming. Paul Hudak and Conal Elliott and played a critical role in defining the ideas behind reactive programming based on denotational design and a continuous time model. Their first attempt to create a pure, compositional, correct and performant FRP system in a purely functional language has had a lasting impact in how people attempt to approach reactive programming.
Nearly 20 years later, you can see this idea really begin to ripple through the industry.
I think its important for developers to share stories about the giants of our industry, both past and present. Our field has such an incredible history and an even more incredible recent history unfolding right in front of us.
People like to tell the story that we're a field obsessed with fads, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. When you begin to really look into the history of various ideas and their communities, you'll be surprised at how long some ideas have been incubating and how timeless their qualities really are.
I'm constantly amazed at all the great people people who work in our field. If there was one way I'd like to see it grow, I'd love people to take the time to tell the stories of these amazing people and explain their ideas.
Haskell remains the only programming language designed by committee that doesn't suck.
To trivialize the other members of that committee actually does injustice to Paul Hudak because it's a rarer art working to bring out the best from among one's distinctioned and distinctly opinionated peers.
In version 1.x, I count roughly a dozen members. By the time of the Haskell 98 standard, the membership doubled.
Source:
http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/?post_type=publication&p=134
The above is the Haskell 1.2 report from 1992. Hudak's name comes first before Peyton Jones' and Wadler's -- the two other editors -- but that's only because they conformed to the last-name-alphabetical-order tradition. Also, the editorship continued to rotate among other people, all the way forth to Simon Marlow, who did Haskell 2010.
We were all so happy to have him back when he beat cancer the first time. I can't believe he won't be around to touch another generation of students.