#17 The Lost Elegance of Computation - Conal Elliott

Type Theory Forall

In this episode I had the pleasure to have an in-depth conversation with Conal Elliott about his life, his work, his philosophy and his many opinions about research and the current state of PL Research and how it lead him to come with the concept of Denotational Design. Conal got his PhD at CMU in the 90s under Frank Pfenning working on Higher-Order Unification, after that he has devoted his life on thinking and refining graphic computation and the tools behind it.

Links

• Conal’s website
• Play/work with Conal
• Conal’s twitter: @conal
• The simple essence of automatic differentiation
• Compiling to categories
• Generic parallel functional programming
• Denotational design with type class morphisms
• Functional Images
• Functional Reactive Animation
• Alphabet Versus the Goddess - Leonard Shlain
• The information - James Gleick
• Murray Gell-Mann’s definition of beauty/elegance: “A theory appears beautiful or elegant […] when it’s simple; in other words when it can be expressed very concisely in terms of mathematics that we’ve already learned for some other reasons.”
• A John Backus quote (from his Turing Award lecture): “Many creative computer scientists have retreated from inventing languages to inventing tools for describing them. Unfortunately, they have been largely content to apply their elegant new tools to studying the warts and moles of existing languages. After examining the appalling type structure of conventional languages, using the elegant tools developed by Dana Scott, it is surprising that so many of us remain passively content with that structure instead of energetically searching for new ones.”