Joachim Breitner's Homepage

Vitaly Bragilevsky, in a mail to the GHC Steering Committee, reminded me that the first version of the Haskell programming language was released exactly 30 years ago. On April 1st. So that raises the question: Was Haskell just an April fool’s joke that was never retracted?

My own first exposure to Haskell was in April 2005; the oldest piece of Haskell I could find on my machine is this part of a university assignment from April:

> pascal 1 = [1]
> pascal (n+1) = zipWith (+) (x ++ [0]) (0 : x) where x = pascal n

This means that I now have witnessed half of Haskell’s existence. I have never regretted getting into Haskell, and every time I come back from having worked in other languages (which all have their merits too), I greatly enjoy the beauty and elegance of expressing my ideas in a lazy and strictly typed language with a concise syntax.

I am looking forward to witnessing (and, to a very small degree, shaping) the next 15 years of Haskell.