Dear fellow Haskellers, the recent (and eternal) questions about GUIs and future Haskell developments are closely related to a general problem: trying to keep up to date with what is going on within the Haskell community as a whole while the breadth of interests in that community keeps expanding. For the sin of pointing out this problem at this year's Haskell workshop, I was volunteered to try and organise some way of getting summaries of what the various (sub-)communities are working on and posting the results to the main Haskell list as well as on haskell.org. Below, you'll find (I) a summary of the problem, (II) my slightly revised suggestion on what to do about it, and (III) a preliminary grouping of Haskell communities by topic (some of which do not have their own mailing lists right now, or are really dispersed over several more specific lists). What I need from you now is (a) a look at the list of topics/communities at the end of this email -- it is meant as a starting point, likely to be incomplete, so if anyone feels left out, if you can confirm some of the topics as dead, or anything else is wrong, let me know. (b) a contact person in each of the communities, willing to put together a brief, representative summary of that community's work and interests (see part II below for what would be useful). Being brief, the individual reports won't require a lot of work for someone actively interested in one of the topics. In fact, they might have to be shorter than you would like them to be - feel free to include pointers to more extensive documentation. The plan is to get this set up over the next weeks, and to give the contact persons a little bit of time to get feedback on their status reports from their communities. As soon as the individual reports start flowing into my mailbox, I'll try to edit them together. Optimistically, we could have the whole report ready for the main Haskell list before October is gone (famous last words..), realistically, we'll wait and see what happens. Ultimately, the aim is to have two yearly updates of the status report, covering all active Haskell communities (sorted by topic); one update in time for the yearly Haskell workshops and one in between. The first go doesn't have to cover everything, we can add or remove topics and fine-tune the level of detail once we get going. The report will - help to keep experienced Haskellers updated - give newcomers some orientation about current activities - help communities to attract collaborators I'll step back now to make room for the volunteers;-) Claus --------------------------------------------------- THE PROBLEM: 1. The Haskell community continues to grow in size and in the variety of interests. [this is good:-] 2. Sub-communities have formed, often with their own mailing lists, to work on specific issues or just to provide foci for specialist discussion. [this is necessary to get some work done] 3. Both specialists and the "just a Haskell user" find it difficult to keep track of what is going on behind the scenes of the main list. In fact, some folks have opted out of much of the main list (the discussions were factored into the "haskell-cafe" list) and only follow the announcements part (the "haskell" list). Few people can afford spending their days reading through all of the dozens of Haskell-related mailing lists (this is not a joke: you'll find about a dozen "real" lists plus a similar number of cvs-watchlists hosted at haskell.org alone, and that isn't counting the lists hosted elsewhere or the communities that use small meetings to coordinate their work). [this is bad, and we can try to do something about it] --------------------------------------------------- THE SUGGESTION: My initial proposal at the workshop was to collect summaries from contacts on the various mailing lists every six months or so and to edit them for the main Haskell list and for a page on haskell.org. However, having combed through the list of mailing lists I am aware of so far, I am more and more convinced that the current proliferation of very narrowly focussed and often shortlived (in terms of activity) mailing lists is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Not to mention that certain important topics, such as GUIs do not even have their own mailing list yet.. My current suggestion is to come up with a broader topical grouping of Haskell communities (see below), and then to solicit brief summaries from contacts in those communities every six months, taking the yearly Haskell workshop as one of the reference points: - twice a year, everyone gets a snapshot of what's happening with Haskell. In the meantime, the communities can get on with their interests without having to bother with summaries too often (it is always difficult to find volunteers..). - six months is enough time to make some real progress and have something worth summarizing. After half a year, the summaries definitely need to be brought up to date, if only to state which groups have dissolved and which are still active. - the summaries should be brief (rough idea: a paragraph each for looking back and for looking ahead, plus pointers to current documents or other deliverables), as they will be collated into overviews of the Haskell community as a whole, but could contain references to more extensive documents or other deliveries. As a side-effect, this cuts down the work for the contact persons. - having status reports grouped by topic should give a more useful and homogeneous picture; it might also encourage people on related mailing lists to cooperate more closely, or people with related interests to set up a mailing list. Where this is perceived necessary, a status report on any given area can be amended by additional paragraphs covering individual mailing lists or projects in that area. - keeping the collected summaries on a page at haskell.org should give both newcomers and experienced Haskellers a rough idea of what is going on, and which sub-communities they might want to join. ----------------------------------------------- What's in a summary? That is really up to you: what do you think Haskellers in general should know about what is going on in your part of the field? Whom would you like to join your efforts? Think of it as an executive summary with pointers to more details. Here is a rough outline: + major topics and results since the last report (~1 paragraph) + current hot topics (some keywords) + major goals for the next six months (~1 paragraph) + pointers to material for further reading (group charter, group home page, how to join, mailing list archives, specifications and drafts, implementations, meetings, minutes,..) So a minimal report is 2-3 paragraphs, plus pointers. If you like, add extra paragraphs for subtopics in your area. That's it! ---------------------------------------------- TOPICS/COMMUNITIES: Below, the major "communities" (as defined by common areas of interest) are grouped into a small number of top-level categories. Most of the communities are themselves spread over several mailing lists or projects, and some topics appear in several categories, with different emphasis (e.g., FFI development depends on a small set of language extensions, on top of which foreign function interfaces can be built as a combination of tools and libraries; also, applications may center around a set of libraries; language extensions are more interesting if implemented, etc.). It would be easiest for me to get status reports for the major groupings, but that might not be feasible (apart from Haskell implementers, I hope; applications, someone?). So: ** I need contact persons for each of the topics ** who are willing to produce a summary report for their own community, with additional paragraphs per sub-group as appropriate (of course, if any of those sub-groups would like to present their own, separate summary instead, feel free to suggest a separate contact person;-). It is quite likely that some of your own topics/communities are not yet on the list -- let me know about such omissions. |what follows is an outline; a slightly more detailed list, with |links, can currently be found at: | | http://www.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/cr3/tmp/Communities/ | |Note the "tmp" - this list should move to haskell.org later. Haskell Communities, by topics ============================== Haskell implementers -------------------- : irregular meetings, visits, email, separate mailing-lists - what's up with each implementation (ghc,nhc,hugs,hbc???)? - what's in store across implementations (implementer's meetings)? Language and implementation extensions -------------------------------------- : separate sub-communities + FFI foreign function interface for Haskell + Libraries hierarchical module namespaces for Haskell + Non-sequential Haskell concurrent, parallel, and distributed Haskell + Type systems extensions and variants of all kinds and types + Generic Haskell generic programming for Haskell (Generic Haskell, Polyp, Strafunski, generalised deriving, Drift, ..) + O'Haskell objects and concurrency for Haskell + Meta Haskell Metaprogramming support ala Meta ML + Haskell modules (re-)emerging interest in a lightweight redesign + Arrows towards built-in support for Libraries --------- : current core priorities are high-level FFI, GUIs, and overall library reorganisation (using hierachical namespaces), + Libraries organisation and collection of libraries (hslibs, nofib, ..) + FFI (Foreign, CForeign, ..) + GUIs (Gtkhs, iHaskell, FranTk, Fudgets, Haggis, Fruit,..) [no separate forum for GUIs yet??] + computer algebra Tools ----- : widely dispersed, small and sometimes short-lived communities, as many tools are still implementation-specific, most of the discussion is currently mixed into the main implementation lists [a combined Haskell-Tools forum might be more appropriate; many tools share similar problems, such as program analysis, etc.; tools should be visible independent of the implementations they depend on, and indeed portable tools would seem to be an important topic..] + FFI (greencard, hdirect, c2hs) + Debuggers [dormant? probably too limited in scope?] + Development tools (tracing, profiling, pre-processors, editor modes, IDEs, testing, ..) + Documentation/Publishing (automated documentation generation tools, source code browsers, literate programming; HaskellDoc, HDoc, Habitat, ..) Applications ------------ : no separate forum yet, but might deserve one separate from the general discussions list? + Haskell for teaching other topics, teaching haskell + stock markets, computer algebra, numerical algorithms, hardware,.. + FRP functional reactive programming [list at yale, dormant?] (robotics, vision, animation, stage lightning, ..)