[Haskell-cafe] Re: How did you stumble on Haskell?

[Jón Fairbairn]

Lennart Augustsson <lennart at augustsson.net> writes:

> On Jan 29, 2007, at 03:01 , Alexy Khrabrov wrote:
> 
> > How do people stumble on Haskell?
> 
> Well, I didn't really stumble on it.  I was at the 1987 meeting
> when we decided to define Haskell.
> 
> But I stumbled on functional programming in the first place.
> I had to learn it because it was part of a course in denotational
> semantics. 

OK, if we old lags are going to give our excuses... I was a
member of an undergraduate society in Cambridge called the
Processor Group.  I went along to a talk that Arthur Norman
gave to them (must have been 1980±1?) in which he described
(S, K, I) combinators and his plans for the SKI Machine
(SKIM). The fact that S and K on their own gave a complete
computational basis was the most exciting piece of computer
science I'd encountered at that point and I just had to
follow it up. So some years later I ended up at that same
1987 meeting.

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk