The pitch for SPJ to leave MS research on Haskell for a video game company must have been pretty compelling so I’m very interested to see how this evolves.
From what I've heard, Microsoft wanted to downsize the research department in Cambridge. By UK labour laws it was possible to lay off basically everyone in a department, but would have legally been much harder to cherry-pick a few people to keep.
SPJ spoke with disappointment about his lack of impact on Microsoft's products. Excel did end up adopting lambdas but that took a decade and a half. Inside Epic, he can roll out functional programming to a young audience that hasn't done much programming before.
And from what I can infer, Microsoft Research seems to be paying quite well. Do you have knowledge that indicates otherwise?
I mean he had lots of options, so the pitch from Epic must have still been pretty good.