September 2015 - Haskell-prime

Call for Nominations: Haskell Prime language committee
by Herbert Valerio Riedel 11 Oct '15

11 Oct '15

Dear Haskell Community, The Haskell Prime[1] standardization process has been dormant since the last version of the Haskell Report ("Haskell 2010"[2]) was published, and the original stated plan of publishing yearly revisions didn't pan out. To make an unfortunate situation even worse, with the recent implementation of the Functor/Applicative/Monad Proposal (AMP)[3], the standard libraries of the principal Haskell implementation have diverged to the point of GHC 7.10 giving up to be a Haskell 2010 conforming implementation. This leads to the desire to (at the very least) update the Haskell Report to reflect current reality, and allow GHC to claim compliance against a newer Haskell Report at some point. Since the last Haskell Prime committee was formed, the Core libraries Committee (CLC)[4] came into existence. One of its principal functions has been to review and comment on library proposals affecting GHC's `base` library, assess the long-term effect on the ecosystem and future Haskell Reports, and finally oversee the implementation. In other words, the CLC has been successfully covering the library part of the Haskell Report in the last couple of years. Consequently, the missing piece to get the Haskell Prime process going again is to put together a committee for the core language part of the Haskell Report. The task of the new language committee is * debate and decide (with the help and support of the broader Haskell community) which language extensions are ready for inclusion, and * put in the work to formalize those extensions into proper specifications suitable for the Haskell Report document. In consultation with the current members of the Haskell Prime committee (and Simon PJ), I have volunteered as chair to "reboot" the process and get things rolling again. The first step is a new round of self-nominations to the committee to bring in new contributors and fresh enthusiasm. To nominate yourself please * join the `haskell-prime` list[5], and * send a short email to me[6] or, if you prefer, to the `haskell-prime` list[5] indicating your desire to self-nominate and any relevant experience. Decisions on these nominations will then be made by discussion among the current members of the committee. Nominations close in 3 weeks time. Regards, Herbert Valerio Riedel [1]: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Committee [2]: https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/ [3]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Functor-Applicative-Monad_Proposal [4]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Core_Libraries_Committee [5]: https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime [6]: mailto:hvriedel+prime@gmail.com -- PGP fingerprint: 427C B69A AC9D 00F2 A43C AF1C BA3C BA3F FE22 B574

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A reluctant self-nomination
by Mario Blažević 25 Sep '15

25 Sep '15

I'm hereby self-nominating for the Haskell' commitee. The main reason I'm applying is because I'm afraid that the commitee might disband like the previous one. If there are enough members already, feel free to ignore my nomination. That being said, here are my qualifications: I started programming in Haskell around the turn of the century. I first published on Hackage in 2008 [1]. I have published 9 packages so far [2], 2 of which are deprecated, and I made small contributions to several other Haskell projects over the years. My projects generally use the minimal set of GHC's extensions that's necessary for the job. While I occasionally comment on Reddit and the mailing lists, I don't publicise much [3][4]. Last year I've managed to get Haskell into production at work. Outside Haskell, my job involves plenty of language maintenance and DSL design, though I wouldn't consider any of it close to the Haskell level of sophistication. In particular, I'm sorely lacking the expertise in type theory. On the other hand, I have plenty of experience in DSL support and language evolution. I can provide more details if necessary. [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/scc-0.1 [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/user/MarioBlazevic [3] https://themonadreader.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/issue19.pdf [4] https://github.com/blamario/monoid-subclasses/wiki/Files/HaskellSymposium20…

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Self-nomination
by wren romano 23 Sep '15

23 Sep '15

Hello, I'd like to nominate myself for the new Haskell Prime committee. Experience-wise: I've been active on the libraries list for something like a decade. A couple years ago I wrote my "burning bridges" email[1], observing that we've long known certain problems with official/standard Haskell, and equally long known the solutions, but had been unwilling to actually push through the communally agreed upon solutions. That email in turn spawned the AMP[2] and the FTP[3]. The AMP has been widely praised as an improvement. The FTP has been more controversial (since it was less thoroughly thought through), but is still I think widely viewed in a positive light. One thing I'd like to see/work on is fully integrating these proposals into the standard, so that we can knock off the rough edges (esp. re the FTP, as we've discovered numerous oversights in how that's been implemented so far) and make things easier and more polished for the other Haskell compilers like JHC and UHC to work with. Outside of Haskell per se, my work focuses on formalizing language semantics. Some examples include my master's work on typed unification in the weighted-logic programming language Dyna[4], my thesis work on chiastic lambda-calculi[5] including mechanized proofs in Coq, and my current work on the probabilistic programming language Hakaru[6]. I also helped Lindsey and Ryan work out the semantic underpinnings of LVars[7], though this isn't documented anywhere. [1] <https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2013-May/019902.html> [2] <https://wiki.haskell.org/Functor-Applicative-Monad_Proposal> [3] <https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9586> [4] I just found out Wes made a github repo <https://github.com/nwf/dyna> for Dyna2 (the reimplementation of Dyna1 we worked on together), though I haven't checked to see whether my typed unification stuff is in there yet. [5] <http://cl.indiana.edu/~wren/pubs/chiastic_nlcs2013.pdf> [6] <https://github.com/hakaru-dev/hakaru> [7] <http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~lkuper/papers/lindsey-kuper-dissertation.pdf> -- Live well, ~wren

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David/quchen nomination
by David Luposchainsky 23 Sep '15

23 Sep '15

Hello *, I'd like to throw my hat in for the committee. Some of you might know me from the proposal texts of the AMP and now the MFP; I've been an active Haskell and #haskell user for a couple of years now (although mostly for private projects library-wise), and during that time I think I've stumbled upon enough design decision explanations, nifty semantical questions, and interesting problems to be ready for the Haskell Prime process. I'm now used to my new job so I have a pretty good idea about how much spare time I have; and since it's going to start snowing in the Alps soon, I think my bike is going to be a clear #2 to Haskell in terms of things I like to do. Greetings, David/quchen

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