Re: [Haskell-cafe] Research language vs. professional language

On Mon, 2008-09-01 at 01:20 -0700, Don Stewart wrote:

ryani.spam:

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On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 7:27 PM, Jonathan Cast wrote:

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This concept of `day-to-day work' is a curious one. Haskell is not a mature language, and probably shouldn't ever be one.

I see where you are coming from here, but I think that train has already started and can't be stopped.

Yeah, it's too late. Too many people have their pay checks riding on GHC, the Hackage library set (now up to 740 libraries and tools!), and the continued development of the language in general.

If Haskell's not "mature" yet, then perhaps it has reached its early twenties, with an reliable heavy duty optimizing compiler, fast runtime, large library set, standard documentation, testing, debugging and packaging tools, and large community.

And a community with a lot of energy.

We're serious about this thing.

I think it's great y'all have a nice language for software development. For that matter, I think it's great *I* have a nice language for software development. ACIO, say, wouldn't really change that. But I think (and expect) Haskell should fork sometime soon, with one branch picking up ACIO and other pragmatic lets-do-this-now stuff, and another branch eschewing them in favor of concentration of research into getting around the need for such features. And, on the other hand, I can help thinking your description fits Unix from c. 1980 pretty well, about the time of the transition from V7 to BSD. Sure, the BSD developers made Unix a lot easier to use and wrote a lot of tools (with a *ton* of options, natch.), but in the process, a certain ability to hold the community to account to its highest ideals was lost. I'd like to see Haskell (including its `practical' branch) not go that route, but I think standardizing the little compromises made along the way is a terrible way to go. Haskell's highest ideals should remain pure. jcc