Impressions of ZuriHac, and Why We Love (and Hate) Haskell
summary
Haskell delivers strong claims: purity and a powerful type system eliminate whole classes of bugs and let developers read code from types alone, but some workloads still need C for speed and GC pauses can bite. Compilation and build times feel slow, and language extensions create fragmentation so code styles and tooling diverge. Learning is steep and often requires yearly refreshers, with the community noting 80% is zero for correctness. ZuriHac mixes talks, research and a hackathon with a free beginner track and easy small PR contributions.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Intro & Welcome
- 0:17Haskell as a superset of other languages
- 0:48Infrastructure, syntax & first steps in FP
- 1:11Math background & type inference
- 1:40Predictability & peace of mind
- 2:1280% correct is not good enough
- 2:28Writing better software with Haskell
- 2:51Reading code just by looking at types
- 3:07Fast and reliable implementation
- 4:09Thinking in Haskell, purity, type safety
- 4:22Great power-to-weight ratio
- 4:41What do you hate about Haskell?
- 5:03Extensions and fragmentation
- 5:38Steep learning curve & relearning every year
- 6:13Perception barriers & elitism myth
- 7:12Technical constraints & meta challenges
- 8:35What did you think of ZuriHac 2025?
- 9:28Between hackathon, research & community
- 10:28“ZuriHac feels like a family reunion”
- 11:15Reflections & personal stories
- 12:00Outro
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