A small announcement :) 6 1/2 years after its inception, under the guiding hand of Shae Erisson (aka shapr), the #haskell IRC channel[1] on freenode has finally reached 500 users! 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, and 500 users by July 2008. This puts the channel at around the 12th largest community of the 7000 freenode channels. For comparision, a sample of the state of the other language communities, with comments comapred to their status a year ago: #php 720 #python 640 -- up from 5th place #perl 620 ##c++ 585 ##c 530
#haskell 502
#rubyonrails 428 #ruby-lang 350 -- down from 420 max. ##javascript 308 #lisp 295 #erlang 178 #perl6 129 -- unchanged #scheme 148 -- unchanged #lua 120 #ocaml 70 -- unchanged You can see the growth of the channel over here: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/irc If you've not dropped by the channel yet, feel free to come and chat, and toss around some lambdas! :) Cheers, Don