I'm not a marketing person and I don't play one on TV --
This seems like a classic case of moving from early adopter/technologist
type of market to a broader/more conservative market. The biggest thing
that has to be done to get Haskell accepted in the the market segment
that we're discussing is to get people to use it successfully (and tell
other people about it, but first things first). Right now, nobody in
that segment of people uses Haskell. I don't think there is a single
package installed by default on a Redhat system that is written in
Haskell.
Once these folks are using the language, the fixes will come. One of
the principles often cited buy open source contributors is that the best
software comes from developers who are trying to "scratch their own
itch". Right now nobody, outside the relatively few people on this
list, has an itch. No itch, no development.
Anyway, back to getting people in that segment to use Haskell -- It
seems to me that the best way to do that is to build a killer
application written in Haskell. Something concrete. Off the top of my
head a good vector graphics program like Corel Draw would be a possible
candidate. This program would have to be indistinguishable from other
applications. In other words it couldn't look "weird". People that had
an itch with respect to the application would need to learn Haskell and
would probably develop an itch our two with the Haskell tools they were
using.
Thanks for listening,
Ted C.
P.S. If somebody could explain Monads in plain english it might not
hurt either.
Mark P Jones wrote:
>
> | Getting the licensing right is an important goal, but if anyone thinks
> | that a more liberal license will result in prolific Haskell library
> | development, forget it. We need worker bees...
>
> Agreed. In fact the only reason I mentioned licensing at all in
> my original posting was to make the comparison to Linux. In fact,
> although I haven't kept records, my sense as far as Hugs is concerned
> is that the number of external patches and bug fixes that we receive
> has actually gone *down* since we moved to the new license ...
>
> The essence of all this is in trying to figure out where we can find our
> worker bees, how do we move from cathedral to bazaar, etc. Is that
> possible? What can we do to stimulate and encourage it? I'm glad to
> see that this thread has already generated some interesting observations
> and suggestions. And, as a practical step, writing libraries seems like
> an excellent way to get involved --- especially if they're useable with
> multiple implementations.
>
> All the best,
> Mark
