> Alex Jacobson writes:
[...]
>
> To the newcomer who is not part of the FP academic community, this all
> makes life sort of difficult. These differences seem larger than the
> differences among C compilers and are MUCH larger than the differences
> among Java compilers. I have been trying to learn Haskell and have been
> impressed with both its elegance and the way it allows me to write code
> that works on the first try (or two).
>
> However, I am not a researcher. I do commercial software development and
> need some documentation and stability. I understand that everything here
> is fairly new, but it would be really usefl if someone would post a
> summary of the FP community politics for those of us outside the research
> community:
[...]
I belive that having good Haskell compilers and interpreters is very
important, and I think that the ones that are available at the moment are
improving with each new release.
However, as Alex Jacobson points out, life is not very easy for the
newcomer. We could make it a little easier by providing better access
to documentation. In particular, I propose that Haskell.org finally
sets up its Haskell Bookshelf repository
(http://www.haskell.org/bookshelf.html). It has been under
construction for months now, but it is still empty.
I have recently visited the SML/NJ web pages and they have a nice
section on literature
(http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/smlnj/doc/literature.html). A good
thing is that there are no less than 10 tutorials on various aspects
of the language.
I'm not asking for new documentation to be written (although,
newcomers would welcome more tutorials), but at least we should have a
collection of whatever is available now in Haskell.org.
Having a couple of mirror sites of Haskell.org would also be a good
idea.
Fermin Reig
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Fermin J. Reig
PhD student, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~reig
