This is a response to Paul's "State of Haskell" message. Maybe everyone is
busy writing Haskell programs --- nobody's said a word!
Simon
| So what have we learned? What's wrong with Haskell, and what's right?
| What's in store for Haskell in the future?
|
| I'd like to engage in some dialogue about this, first by email, but
| also with the hope of organizing a workshop at the upcoming FPCA
| Conference to discuss the future of Haskell in more detail.
I think that a pre-FPCA workshop is a Great Idea. Paul, John Launchbury,
Phil Wadler and I discussed it a bit when we met up at POPL. Stay tuned for
more mail from Paul on the subject.
| Libraries
| ---------
| We need to collaborate on establishing standard libraries of various
| sorts. This may involve a serious reorganization of the Standard
| Prelude, but in any case needs to go beyond the Prelude to include
| libraries for standard I/O, graphics, GUIs, combinator parsers and
| printers, certain kinds of mathematics, etc.
Yes!
| Standardization
| ---------------
| As painful as it may be, I think that we need to formally standardize
| Haskell via one or more of the standard standardization organizations.
I'm more dubious about this. I have not met a single person who's problem
with Haskell was that it isn't an ISO std.
| A Process for Change
| --------------------
| I think that we need a process for changing Haskell. In particular,
| for the near-term I propose the following: Let's organize a workshop
| at the upcoming FPCA conference and solicit papers addressing specific
| deficiencies of Haskell, proposed language changes, etc. The workshop
| should include not only presentations of accepted papers, but also
| open discussions of design issues, process issues, etc. I think that
| our next milestone should NOT be incremental: we should strive for a
| major (if necessary) revision aka Haskell 2.0.
I'm not sure we're ready yet to embark on a formal "let's design Haskell
2.0" exercise. I favour something a bit more informal, perhaps focussed
round an annual workshop, in which we explore design options. Then, when
it's become clear who are the active contributors, we lock them all up in a
room together for a year and hey-presto: Haskell 2.
| Publicity
| ---------
| I think we've done a poor job overall of publicizing Haskell and
| functional programming in general. More papers in CACM and other
| "glossy" journals -- even BYTE! -- are needed. A paper in Scientific
| American would be way cool, although it may be too narrow for their
| purposes.
Yes!
