Lambda the Ultimate

A Simon Peyton Jones interview as part of the series The A-Z of Programming Languages that Naomi Hamilton has been putting together. Posting this one to the front page, not because of any bias towards functional programming, so much as it stands on its own as interesting and insightful from the standpoint of programming language design and evolution.

To supplant established languages, even in the functional programming area, like Haskell or ML or Scheme, you have to build a language that’s not only intriguing and interesting, and enables people to write programs faster, but you also need an implementation that can handle full scale applications and has lots of libraries and can handle profilers and debuggers and graphical analyzers… there’s a whole eco-system that goes with a programming language, and it’s jolly hard work building that up.