I caught up with the venerable Erik Meijer recently to discuss functional programming languages, academic versus real-world application of functional programming languages (there are very good reasons why people don’t program Windows applications in, say, Haskell…) and, well, Erik. Why does Erik work here? What’s his history? Of course, as an academic type (he also ships software so he’s not purely academic…), Erik is a big fan of strict functional or pure functional, as it were. This is a deep interview and Erik spends most of the time on the whiteboard.