"I really don't have any regrets." — Brent Yorgey
Published: 2021-09-02 19:45:28

Hello wonderful Haskell Lovers! 

[Haskell Love](https://haskell.love/) are ready to rock! Our engines are starting! Last year there were 1800 of you. We need your help to pump it up till 2000 this year! Let's show this world how powerful the #Haskell community is!!! 

And please welcome our next speaker - [Brent Yorgey](https://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/), well-known in the Haskell community as the author of the [Typeclassopedia](https://wiki.haskell.org/Typeclassopedia)  and the primary author of the diagrams vector graphics [framework.](https://diagrams.github.io/)  Over the past five years, he has solved over 1500 competitive programming problems on [Open Kattis](http://open.kattis.com/), almost 1000 of them in Haskell.  He currently teaches CS & math at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, USA.  When he's not teaching, hacking, or helping take care of three kids, he also enjoys playing the piano, learning Spanish, and reading anything written by N. K. Jemisin.

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**For people who work in Haskell, what Library do you desperately want someone to write?**

For a current fun side project I really wish there was a nice library for coherent noise and procedural generation. I will probably just end up writing it myself.

**If you had to pick one thing to include in the next Haskell Report, what would it be?**

To be honest, I really don't care!

**What would, in your opinion, be a Haskell “killer application”?**

Haskell's strong type system, along with tools such as LiquidHaskell, make it possible to formally verify program properties at compile time. This makes it much less likely that a Haskell application would actually kill someone.

**What would be your favourite piece of Haskell-branded clothing?**

It's not strictly Haskell-branded, but I do love my [Lambdaman shirt](https://www.customink.com/fundraising/lambdaman).

**What I Wish I’d Known When Learning Haskell?**

I really don't have any regrets. In most cases, when people look back and wish they had known X when they were learning Y, they are [misunderstanding their own learning process](https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/); knowing X earlier would not have helped. And I'm still learning Haskell, so it's not too late!

**Once we were over the infamous Haskell learning curve, we began looking for functional programming, immutability, and types everywhere! Given that most modern applications are web apps, it is only a matter of time before we make the switch to typed-FP for front-end development. Would you write the front end in Haskell?**

No, because I would not write it in any language. I hate web development. But if someone else is writing it, then of course, they ought to use Haskell for that.

**State of Haskell Survey results in 2020 shows that the number of developers who use Hackage vs. Stackage is almost the same. Which one do you use, why?**

I don't really understand this question, because they are not mutually exclusive; Stackage is built on top of Hackage. I use both, of course. I tend to use in situations where I care about build reproducibility, and for everything else.

**96% of respondents of the State of Haskell Survey said they code as a hobby, do you? Is that for an open source project?**

Absolutely. I have been writing open-source Haskell code as a hobby for almost 15 years.

**If you wanted to convince someone to use Haskell, what would you say?**

Convincing people by talking at them rarely works. Instead, I would just show off some cool things I've done with Haskell, and give them some of my course notes to read.

**If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?**

I'd love to see a better-decomposed class.

Join Brent on the 10th of September at 16.20 CEST at Joy Track, he will be speaking about **Competitive Programming in Haskell**. 


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Let's get 2000!