Professor Hudak is interested in functional programming, theory of programming languages, and application of programming language principles to multimedia software development. Hudak believes that programming languages should be pushed farther in the direction of high-level abstractions in which the programmer says less about the details of a computation and more about the problem specification itself. At the same time he recognizes the need for smart compilation techniques to make such languages practical. His most recent interest is in applying these principles to multimedia technology, including music and sound production, graphics and animation, and GUI design.
Hudak was the primary organizer and chairperson of the "Haskell Committee", an international group of computer scientists who designed Haskell, a pure functional programming language. He is an editor of the Journal of Functional Programming, member of the ACM and IEEE, member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Parallel Programming and Lisp and Symbolic Computation, charter member of IFIP WG2.8 Working Group on Functional Programming, and served as Associate Editor of ACM TOPLAS. He has consulted for Los Alamos National Laboratory, IBM T.J. Watson Research Laboratory, and Intermetrics, Inc.