Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png
with nearly 2000 (!) people reading haskell-cafe@, perhaps its time to think some more about how to build and maintain this lovely Haskell community we have. Just yesterday I received an email:
"I posted it to Haskell-Cafe and received loads of brilliant responses. Wow, those guys are awesome. I'm definitely going to learn Haskell now."
Which is *exactly* the kind of (view of the) community we want to build and encourage, so we can keep the Haskell project growing into the future.
Hear, hear. I'm a Haskell newbie. I've not posted much, but my copy of The Haskell School of Expression just arrived from Amazon, and I'm stoked.
I think the main thing we need to remember is to help train new experts in the community, to be fluent in the culture, ensuring that expertise and a knowledge of the culture diffuses through the new people arriving.
All important. I've spent a fair amount of time in the Ruby community. I got started on Ruby around 2001, and found the community welcoming and helpful, even when I was asking what were likely many dopey questions. The general climate was sufficient to make me want to be more involved; I went and started ruby-doc.org to do my share to help the community grow, and tried to stay active on Ruby lists to help others as I had been helped. This was quite different from my experiences when learning other languages. To be fair, I don't really recall to what extent I was using Usenet and discussion groups when learning Perl, PHP, or Java, but I don't think there was the same emphasis on niceness and the promotion of an explicit community culture. I think Haskell has a reputation for being "hard", of being a dense, academic, egghead language. In short, it's scary. The more people who try it who can report good responses from the community and code success stories the more people there will be who can help each batch of newcomers. Thanks, James Britt