SPJ is not only an amazing teacher and speaker but in his role as a Haskell community elder (leader?) he sets a really shining example in how he addresses people new to both haskell and functional programming.
For someone who has accomplished so much and is clearly so smart he appears to be very humble.
Why is there so much content on Haskell coming out of Microsoft Research? I've seen multiple Haskell papers out of them and I think they're the initial developers on cloud haskell as well?
Does MS have any technology related to Haskell at all? Or is it just research for the sake of it?
Microsoft is the employer of two of the developers for the GHC compiler. Microsoft certainly has technologies related to Haskell such as F#. Also, a lot of the ideas for the new features of C# are based on the research and experience they've gained with Haskell. Linq, Lambda's, Task Parallel Framework etc.
MS does have some technology related to Haskell (F# comes to mind immediately). However, I think Microsoft Research is also fairly academic--they are an actual research institution rather than an R&D lab. They are not at all afraid of very theoretic research with little regard for short-term profit. Which is really awesome.
> Does MS have any technology related to Haskell at all? Or is it just research for the sake of it?
It's mostly for the sake of it, although some has trickled into F# and C#. MSR is the employer of two primary GHC developers (including SPJ, who's giving this talk), it's an organ quite similar to Xerox's PARC or Bell Labs: it does core research which may or may not be marketable in the long run.
For someone who has accomplished so much and is clearly so smart he appears to be very humble.