Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Hoogle and Network.Socket

On Feb 25, 2009, at 7:49 PM, Achim Schneider wrote:

"John A. De Goes" wrote:

...

The problem is that PL research is probably not going to stop evolving in our lifetimes. Yes, that research needs a venue, but why should it be Haskell? Haskell is a good language and it's time to start benefiting from the research that's already gone into it. That means some tradeoffs.

Why shouldn't it be Haskell?

More, why *can't* it be Haskell. Haskell is already constrained by backwards compatibility, which limits future directions. Partial functions and dependent typing do not seem to play well together, for instance. Moreover, look at the packages being uploaded to Hackage: they're almost all trying to do useful stuff. The direction of Haskell has already changed, and I don't see it reverting to its old course.

Not really, look at e.g. type families, which give you much of the power dependently typed languages give you while saying "nah, not yet" to the question of how to deal with non-terminating typechecking.

*Some*, not *much*, and there are dependently typed languages that have guaranteed terminating type checking.

About the H' progress... It's hard to tell how many drops are needed to make a bucket overflow, especially if you've got no idea what the bucket looks like. What certainly isn't happening is people taking a house, trying to overflow a badly leaking bucket.

As far as I know, H' was supposed to be completed many years ago. Likely, it won't be completed for many more years. H2 is probably more than a decade away, if it happens at all. Regards, John A. De Goes N-BRAIN, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101