I thought this message (originally on haskell-cafe) was worth sending to the main Haskell list. Mark makes good points. I've appended Manuel's reply Simon -----Original Message----- From: Mark Carroll [mailto:mark@chaos.x-philes.com] Sent: 28 October 2002 21:28 To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Subject: Active Haskell development and libraries The Libraries and Tools For Haskell page has quite a list of things, but a few broken links, and links to very many projects that seem to have started off as interesting research projects that, as the page itself says, were more proofs of concept and are no longer maintained. We can't help but be slightly worried by this when we're thinking about what language(s) try out for production code, given that when we look at things like Objective Caml there are nice things like the Caml Humps at http://caml.inria.fr/humps/ that shows a lot of recent work, and even a new O'Caml O'Reilly book coming out (well, mostly a translation of the French book, I think). The Haskell Communities and Activities Report is a great start for showing some recent Haskell activity, and the Libraries and Tools page at least separates out the unsupported GUI-libraries, and there is certainly some good stuff for Haskell - for instance, we like HUnit and Haddock, and I'm thinking that Parsec might come in handy. Still, at our end we're wanting to stop and think: I'm looking forward to reading the next communities and activities report. In particular, I want to reassure myself that there is a lot of useful actively-maintained stuff we can use, and more coming. Although I'm very happy that the libraries and tools page exists at all, I wonder if there's any possibility of the Haskell stuff being listed in a nice table too, including information as when the latest release was and with what versions of which Haskell compilers each thing was last found to be working. Maybe there is some existing free software that can make such a site easily maintained? Obviously I'm not demanding that all you guys write lots of extra libraries and tools for Haskell for free for me. (-: (Of course, stuff is already being written and released by posters here.) Partly I'm suggesting that, to avoid putting people off using Haskell, maybe the active and currently-working things should be highlighted and easy to find relative to the other things, right on the libraries and tools page, given that currently there are a few broken links and projects that are practically stalled, and partly I'm wanting to see what other people think about where Haskell is now relative to things like O'Caml from the point of view of commercial instead of research users. At least, am I right in thinking that more industrial Haskell users are wanted, and that it's not meant to be solely an interesting piece of research? To take an example, right now we're not exactly sure what the recommended way is to have Java code call our Haskell functions, for instance. (Background: I have reasonable influence in a tiny company and would like us to use Haskell to create some of our core products - I'm a big believer that use of rich, strong, static typing and a functional style will bring us benefits - at least, I'd like to exploit the fruits of programming language research in recent decades. However, although I'm fairly optimistic about Haskell's future, I've jumped the wrong way before, and I'm wanting to make sure that the momentum in the Haskell community is in the right direction. We would be very happy to contribute stuff ourselves if we needed to to bring things the final few inches toward what we need, as we're generally opensource fans, but we're too small to fund a whole lot of general stuff right now.) Apologies if this seems to be a reiteration of previous vocal worrying I've been doing. (-: Really, I'm just hoping that some changes on the libraries and tools page can help users of Haskell and encourage more people to join the community - especially given that much of the legwork is already being done by Claus anyway - and to help us be sure that Haskell and its associated things is, strategically, a good technology for us to rely on, from the point of view of there being a vibrant and growing repository of useful libraries. -- Mark -----Original Message----- From: Manuel M T Chakravarty [mailto:chak@cse.unsw.edu.au] Sent: 29 October 2002 05:57 To: mark@chaos.x-philes.com Cc: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Subject: Re: Active Haskell development and libraries Mark Carroll <mark@chaos.x-philes.com> wrote,
We can't help but be slightly worried by this when we're thinking about what language(s) try out for production code, given that when we look at
You surely have a point here. IMHO what is needed is a system that allows library, tool, etc maintainers to add, edit, and delete entries themselves. If these entries are annotated with the date of the last update, it also becomes easier to gauge whether a project is still alive. An automatic system might even test for stale links and remove or mark them. An alternative to set up our own system would be to use an existing one; eg, freshmeat.com. There is a "Haskell" sub-category under programming languages: http://freshmeat.net/browse/834/?topic_id=834 which currently contains only 14 entries. At the very least, this sub-category could be linked from the "Libraries and Tools page" (Hello Olaf & John!) and people could be encouraged to submit their work to freshmeat. The nice side effect of this is that Haskell software, then, also pops up in general language-independent searches on freshmeat. Manuel