A small announcement :) 7 years after its inception, under the guiding hand of Shae Erisson (aka shapr), the #haskell IRC channel[1] on freenode has reached 600 concurrent users! It's now in the top 3 language channels by size. To chart the growth, we can note that the channel was founded in late 2001, and had slow growth till 2006, reaching 200 users in January of that year. Since then growth in the user base has been far more rapid, reaching 300 users in Dec 2006, 400 users in August 2007, 500 users by July 2008, and 600 on January 2, 2009. This puts the channel at the 7th largest community of the 7000 freenode channels, and in the top 3 language communities. For comparision, a sample of the state of the other language communities, with comments comapred to their status a year ago: #php 612 #python 604
#haskell 602 -- up 4
##c++ 558 ##c 506 -- down 1 #perl 502 -- down 3 #ruby-lang 288 -- down #lisp 264 ##javascript 241 #erlang 146 -- unchanged #perl6 129 -- unchanged #scheme 123 -- down #lua 102 -- unchanged #clojure 78 #ocaml 70 -- unchanged You can see the growth of the channel over here: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel If you've not dropped by the channel yet, feel free to come and chat, and toss around some lambdas! :) Cheers, Don