On 1/28/07, Chris Kuklewicz
I think many of the users of Haskell forget that there are a lot of people out there who are not career academics working with pure mathematics day-in and day-out.
GHC seems to be developed by several people at Microsoft Research. They are not career academics. I am less familiar with the other compilers.
There's no need for the "seems to be". The excellent "History of Haskell" paper: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/index.htm discusses the history of every extant Haskell compiler, in section 9. If I'm reading correctly, every one of these compilers (except possibly for jhc, it's not clear) began as an academic research project at a university -- that includes GHC, which was developed by academics at the University of Glasgow (hence the "G" in "GHC"), and it was only later that some of them moved to MSR. Be careful about conflating "academic" with "not practical". It's true that academics haven't always had time to explain the useful, practical techniques they discover in ways that are understandable by programmers who don't have formal mathematical backgrounds (and be careful about conflating "having a PhD" with "having mathematical background or experience", too). In the same way that programmers have jobs to do and thus have limited time to puzzle out new languages, academics have jobs that don't tend to reward them for spending time making those puzzles clearer to practitioners. As a challenge to everyone posting on this thread: rather than excoriating academia for its sins, why not start creating the documentation (or tutorials or libraries or applications) you wish to see? Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "No one's actually said 'O great America, thank you for saving us from the evil communist bug-eyed aliens, and, can we have fries with that?' yet have they?" -- Debra Boyask