Wouter Swierstra is a Math Bachelor’s from the University of Utrecht, has done his PhD with Thorsten Altenkirch at the University of Nottingham, did a post-doc at Chalmers, has experience in the industry working on facilitating the design of embedded system using FP and currently is a Professor at the University of Utrecht and co-host of the Haskell Interlude Podcast.

In this episode we talk about his trajectory into formal methods and functional programming. We talk about Datatypes a la Carte, the Expression Problem, Functional Pearls, Program Synthesis vs Program Calculation, and much more!

0:00 – Intro & Welcome 0:02:08 – Announcing the Type Theory Forall Merch Store! 1:12 – Early Influences: From Lenses to Logic 4:40 – Discovering Functional Programming in Utrecht 8:15 – On Monads, Papers, and Learning by Teaching 12:20 – What Makes a Paper ‘Beautiful’? 17:50 – PhD in Nottingham: Theory Meets Community 22:00 – Writing ‘Certified Programming with Dependent Types’ 29:10 – Teaching Dependent Types: Challenges and Joys 34:00 – On Agda vs Coq: Philosophies and Use Cases 38:40 – Type-Driven Development in Practice 45:05 – The Power of Elegant Proofs 52:00 – Advice to Aspiring Researchers in Type Theory 1:03:00 – Beating C with Functional Programming 1:20:00 – Formal Verification and Loop Invariants 1:33:28 – Program Calculation vs Program Synthesis 1:39:00 – Formalizing Blockchain 2:01:38 – Final Thoughts

Links

• Wouter Website

• Haskell Interlude

• Advanced FP Summer School

• ttforall twitch

• ttforall store

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