Haskell was standardized in 1998 after research by Philip Wadler and other functional-programming researchers.
The language is named after Haskell Curry, the American mathematician and logician whose work influenced combinatory logic and functional programming. Haskell’s design committee brought together ideas from earlier languages, including Miranda, and aimed to create a non-strict, purely functional language with a strong static type system.
Haskell 98 was released as a stable language standard in 1998. The language is known for lazy evaluation, type classes, algebraic data types, and powerful type inference. Glasgow Haskell Compiler, usually called GHC, is its dominant implementation.
Haskell is sometimes confused with Miranda because both use lazy functional techniques and similar notation. Haskell’s type system and formal design made it especially influential in programming-language research, even where production systems use other languages.