#17 The Lost Elegance of Computation - Conal Elliott

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.

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.”