April 2016 - Haskell-prime

Chairship / responsibility
by Richard Eisenberg 09 May '16

09 May '16

Hi Prime, Is there a chair of this committee? Herbert has been acting as such (thank you!) but doesn't list himself as the chair in the initial announcement. I am **in no way** trying to change any status quo and am **not** interested in being chair at the moment, but I just wanted to clarify. The specific reason I ask is that Takenobu Tani recently asked about `pseq`. I have no intelligent response to offer, but would want to make sure that someone does offer a response. If there is a chair, that person is de facto responsible that we, as a committee, communicate well, both internally and externally. Thanks, Richard

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Infrastructure & Communication
by Herbert Valerio Riedel 09 May '16

09 May '16

Hello Fellow Committee Members! Following up on the official announcement, here's a few basic things we should get agreement over before proceeding. First off, I'm hoping we can manage to avoid confusing email-threading in the interest of finding information easier lateron in the email archives. To this end, I'd like to ask you to consider changing the subject of your reply if you realise that the topic discussed is diverging significantly from the one advertised in the Subject-header. I'll start with the following basic topic ## Infrastructure & Communication Obviously, we have *this* public (archived) mailing list "haskell-prime(a)haskell.org". There's also a (registered) IRC channel "#haskell-prime" on freenode where many of us will probably hang around. In the past, the Prime committee used Trac (currently at https://prime.haskell.org/ ) to organise its work. Trac provides a wiki, source-browser, and a ticket tracker (which is familiar to GHC developers, and e.g. allows easy migration of wiki-content to/from the GHC Wiki). Some time ago, I converted the original Haskell-Report Darcs repositories into a single Git repository (with branches) at GitHub - https://github.com/haskell/haskell-report This repo is setup to be mirrored to - https://git.haskell.org/haskell-report.git which in turn is also accessible from within Trac at - https://prime.haskell.org/browser However, since Trac has accumulated quite a bit of old content in its ticket-tracker over the years, and "Haskell 2020" has been coined a reboot. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to start over at GitHub, and consider the Trac instance mostly as a legacy archive of historic content. GitHub allows for Git-based workflows, and there's prior art related to language design we could steal ideas from, for instance: - https://github.com/fsharp/FSharpLangDesign - https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs - https://github.com/golang/proposal - (any others noteworthy?) IMO, GitHub's issue tracker has become flexible enough for our needs and its integration with Git pull-requests allows to e.g. group together change proposal description/motivation, discussion, and finaly the delta to the haskell-report (with inline annotations/reviews) and so on. (However, I consider GitHub's Wiki-component quite weak. I'm not sure what to do about that. Maybe keep using Trac's wiki for that?) Moreover, we can have CI (I've actually set up a TravisCI job which builds the LaTeX code) for the Haskell Language report drafts. One benefit I see from using GitHub is that this way would we be closer to the Haskell community (given the majority of Hackage packages are hosted on GitHub), and our work would be more transparent for the community as well as offering a lower barrier to participation/contribution. Moreover, I think GitHub would also help make our efforts/progress towards a revised Haskell Report more visible to the community, which in turn may even provide us the motivation to carry on... So... Does anyone object to using GitHub? In case there's no objection, which of the existing language-design GitHub projects do you consider a good fit for Haskell Prime and therefore worthy of imitation? Any other comments/suggestions? Cheers, HVR

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Evaluation order control between two expressions
by Takenobu Tani 01 May '16

01 May '16

Dear Community, Apologies if I'm missing context. Does Haskell 2020 specify evaluation order control by `pseq`? We use `pseq` to guarantee the evaluation order between two expressions. But Haskell 2010 did not specify how to control the evaluation order between two expressions. (only specified `seq` in Haskell 2010 section 6.2 [1]. but `seq` don't guarantee the order. [2]) I think it's better to explicitly specify `pseq` as standard way. Already discussed? or out of scope? [1]: https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch6.html#x13-126000… [2]: https://www.schoolofhaskell.com/user/snoyberg/general-haskell/advanced/eval… Regards, Takenobu

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Re: Chairship / responsibility
by wren romano 30 Apr '16

30 Apr '16

> Hi Prime, > > Is there a chair of this committee? Herbert has been acting as such (thank you!) but doesn't list himself as the chair in the initial announcement. I am **in no way** trying to change any status quo and am **not** interested in being chair at the moment, but I just wanted to clarify. > > The specific reason I ask is that Takenobu Tani recently asked about `pseq`. I have no intelligent response to offer, but would want to make sure that someone does offer a response. If there is a chair, that person is de facto responsible that we, as a committee, communicate well, both internally and externally. I don't know that we have one (officially), but I agree that getting/agreeing-on one should be done soon. -- Live well, ~wren

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Haskell Prime 2020 committee
by Howard B. Golden 29 Apr '16

29 Apr '16

I request that the committee members create a Haskell Prime page on the Haskell wiki with capsule descriptions of their affiliations, Haskell experience and links to their home pages. I believe this will help make the process more transparent to the community. Thanks. Howard

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Infrastructure and Communication
by Thomas Bereknyei 29 Apr '16

29 Apr '16

I am not on the committee, just a lurker. I find the Golang proposal/design doc approach amenable to the expected scope of work. Another benefit of the GitHub approach is greater participation by non committee members. Tom > GitHub allows for Git-based workflows, and there's prior art related to > language design we could steal ideas from, for instance: > > - https://github.com/fsharp/FSharpLangDesign > - https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs > - https://github.com/golang/proposal > - (any others noteworthy?)

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ANN: Haskell Prime 2020 committee has formed
by Herbert Valerio Riedel 28 Apr '16

28 Apr '16

Dear Haskell Community! Some time ago I asked for nominations to reboot the Haskell Prime process[1], and now I'm pleased to finally announce the formation of the new Haskell Language 2020 Committee! The goal of the Haskell Language committee together with the Core Libraries Committee is to work towards a new Haskell 2020 Language Report. I'd like to remind everyone that the Haskell Prime Process[4] relies on *everyone* in the community to help by contributing proposals which the committee will then evaluate and if suitable help formalise for inclusion. Everyone interested in participating is also invited to join the haskell-prime mailing list. Four years (or rather ~3.5 years) from now may seem like a long time. However, given the magnitude of the task at hand, to discuss, formalise, and implement proposed extensions (taking into account the recently enacted three-release-policy[3]) to the Haskell Report, the process shouldn't be rushed. Consequently, this may even turn out to be a tight schedule after all. However, it's not excluded there may be an interim revision of the Haskell Report before 2020. Based on this schedule, GHC 8.8 (likely to be released early 2020) would be the first GHC release to feature Haskell 2020 compliance. Prior GHC releases may be able to provide varying degree of conformance to drafts of the upcoming Haskell 2020 Report. The Haskell Language 2020 committee starts out with 20 members which contribute a diversified skill-set. These initial members also represent the Haskell community from the perspective of practitioners, implementers, educators, and researchers. - Andres Löh - Antonio Nikishaev - Austin Seipp - Carlos Camarao de Figueiredo - Carter Schonwald - David Luposchainsky - Henk-Jan van Tuyl - Henrik Nilsson - Herbert Valerio Riedel - Iavor Diatchki - John Wiegley - José Manuel Calderón Trilla - Jurriaan Hage - Lennart Augustsson - M Farkas-Dyck - Mario Blažević - Nicolas Wu - Richard Eisenberg - Vitaly Bragilevsky - Wren Romano The Haskell 2020 committee is a language committee; it will focus its efforts on specifying the Haskell language itself. Responsibility for the libraries laid out in the Report is left to the Core Libraries Committee (CLC)[5]. Incidentally, the CLC still has an available seat[2]; if you would like to contribute to the Haskell 2020 Core Libraries you are encouraged to apply for this opening. As this is a general announcement broadcasted to multiple mailing lists, a separate email discussing the next steps of the new committee will be sent to the haskell-prime mailing list shortly. [1]: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2015-September/003936.html [2]: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2015-November/026497.html [3]: https://prime.haskell.org/wiki/Libraries/3-Release-Policy [4]: https://prime.haskell.org/wiki/Process [5]: https://prime.haskell.org/wiki/Libraries -- hvr

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Update on Haskell Prime reboot?
by José Manuel Calderón Trilla 22 Apr '16

22 Apr '16

Hello all, I'm curious if there is any progress on the reboot of the Haskell Prime committee. It has been six months since the closing of nominations and there hasn't been any word that I'm aware of. I've also spoken to a few others that have self-nominated and they too have not heard any news. Personally, I feel that a new standard is very important for the future health of the community. Several threads on the mailing list and posts on the web, such as one on reddit today [1], show a desire from the community for a major consolidation effort. If there is any way that I can help the process along I would be glad to do so. It would be a shame to allow for the enthusiasm for a new committee fade away. Cheers, José [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/4fsuvu/can_we_have_xhaskell2016_w…

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