Teaching Abstraction: Brent Yorgey

05/17/18

Brent Yorgey is a professor of math and CS at Hendrix College. He studys functional programming in Haskell, type systems, and category theory, and more. He is the creator of the diagrams vector graphics Haskell library. He taught Introduction to Haskell and The Art of Recursion at the University of Pennsylvania (which were my two favorite classes in college!).

In this conversation, we talk about Brent’s Monad Tutorial Fallacy essay, type systems, FRP, essential vs accidental complexity in Haskell, and the perils of reading academic CS papers and ways to overcome them.

Links

• Brent’s Hendrix Website
• blog :: Brent -> [String]
• The Math Less Traveled
• Abstraction, intuition, and the “monad tutorial fallacy”
• Monads are like burritos
• Explaining Type Errors
• Disco Lang
• Boolean Blindness