A quick look at impredicativity
Type inference for parametric polymorphism is wildly successful, but has always suffered from an embarrassing flaw: polymorphic types are themselves not first class. We present Quick Look, a…
Simon Peyton Jones
Senior Principal Researcher
Computing at School
Computing education in England now treats computer science as a foundational subject that all children should learn, from primary school onwards.
How to write a great research paper
This talk offers seven simple, concrete suggestions for how to improve your research papers. You may also find my talks on how to write a great research proposal…
About
I’m a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. I started here in Sept 1998. I’m also an Honorary Professor of the Computing Science Department at Glasgow University, where I was a professor during 1990-1998.
I’m interested in the design, implementation, and application of lazy functional languages. In practical terms, that means I spend a most of my time on the design and implementation of the language Haskell. In particular, much of my work is focused around the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and its ramifications.
I am chair of Computing at School, the group at the epicentre of the reform of the national curriculum for Computing in England. Computer science is now a foundational subject, alongside maths and natural science, that every child learns from primary school onwards (background here).
I am married to Dorothy, a priest in the Church of England. We have six children.
Research skills
Useful information and links
- The Computing at School Working Group
- A 2014 Microsoft blog post about CAS and computing education
- My Win32 cheat sheet
- My GPG key fingerprint is: CABA 2C32 0D13 B715 8611 0390 6B2B 1815 5F25 C538
Haskell stuff
- The International Conference on Functional Programming
- The Revised Haskell 98 Report
- The main Haskell home page
- The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
- Johan Tibell’s State of Haskell 2010 questionnaire results
- John Hughes’s links to tutorials on functional programming
- A History of Haskell: being lazy with class.
- Tackling the awkward squad: monadic input/output, concurrency, exceptions, and foreign-language calls in Haskell.
- Type classes: exploring the design space
- Wearing the hair shirt: a retrospective on Haskell. Slides of my invited talk at POPL’03
- A taste of Haskell. Video and slides from my tutorial on Haskell at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, 2007
- The main Haskell mailing list
Social networks
I use LinkedIn for professional networking, but I restrict my connections to people who I know personally, or with whom I have had some meaningful two-way professional interaction; that is, not simply people with whom I share a professional interest.
I use Facebook for non-work networking, but only for people who my family knows too.
I do have a Twitter account, for some reason, but I have yet to find something significant enough to say that it’s worth tweeting.
In all three cases my actual use is minimal, so don’t hold your breath.