"Simon Peyton-Jones"
Languages flourish when libraries are plentiful, reliable, and well documented. In an open-source community like the Haskell community, plentiful libraries depend on contributions from the community.
The difficulty is that it is currently not obvious what Joe Programmer should do to contribute a library to the community.
I think this difficulty is a major obstacle to Haskell's progress, perhaps even the largest single obstacle today.
http://sf.net/projects/haskell-libs/ was created as a place to create, collect and maintain explicitly licensed Open Source libraries for/in Haskell. haskell-libs now has: * irc 'bot ( lambdabot ) * web server with plugins ( hws-wp, derivative of Simon Marlow's hws ) * crypto modules ( Blowfish, RC4, TEA, ISAAC, crc32 ) * rfc2822 parser * rudimentary maildir search engine (lambdabot plugin) * rudimentary bayesian spam filter * chess game * brainfuck interpreter I'd be happy to add haskell developers to the haskell-libs project, just email me or talk to me on the #haskell irc channel.
The lack of this library-building infrastructure is a serious problem. Solving it, or even partially solving it, would be a huge step forward. So this message is really to try to kick-start the process again. Is anyone willing to invest effort in making this happen?
Perhaps the first thing to do is to assemble list of people who would be willing to contribute as supporters (in the above sense), hoping that a Czar may then emerge by popular acclaim. Would you like to reply, perhaps to the 'libraries@haskell.org' list, so indicate interest.
I really think this is important. If we do not collectively evolve a way to develop libraries in "bazaar" mode, I think Haskell will at best develop more slowly, and at worst wither away.
I agree with this, and I'd like to contribute. PS. does anyone know how to contact Jan Skibinski from numeric-quest.com? Jan's haskell sources don't have a license, and I'd like to add them to the haskell-libs CVS tree. -- Shae Matijs Erisson - 2 days older than RFC0226 #haskell on irc.freenode.net - We Put the Funk in Funktion 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10 ; putStr $ fix ("HELLO\n"++)