Oh how the chatroom hath slain its thousands, and email its ten thousands! Flattening real, hard-working, deep-thinking people into a few paragraphs of letters does such injustice to propinquity that it's a wonder it ever works at all!
It's for that very reason I want to voice my approval of the idea of mentors. The thing that IRC cannot give you is a (real) name and a real face. The true fabric underlying any process or system is the people that make it happen. If the relationships of the people are broken, no virtual system will ever be able to recover the loss. I can't help but believe that the best way to improve the community of contributors is to improve the relationships of the people in it. Therefore, having a process of providing mentorship could be the most effective way to address the myriad technical difficulties of contributing to GHC. Love covers a multitude of wrongs. A friendly helper could easily make up for the technical infelicities or inexperience. In the long term, the improved strength of community could begin to address any technical issues as well.
That said, I am not sure if mentorship is a burden the current "in-crowd" would be able to bear. But even with minimal hand-holding the improvement to propinquity could have significant effect.
Lastly, as one who is building his business, in part, on the advantage of Haskell, I want to express my deep gratitude to both sides of the debate. Chris, your efforts to improve the "on-boarding" process are truly herculean and a massive investment to the community. Thank you! Matthew, and other core devs, your hard work and world-class insight make Haskell the technology that it is today and I cannot thank you enough.
Elliot Cameron