"Excuse me, I think this i my stop..." - Resigning from the Platform

[Simon Peyton Jones]

Ha ha.  You may wonder why I’m replying to a message from four months ago.

Mark’s message was written on 13 Oct 2015, and was delivered to me then. And I replied the same day, at rather greater length than below.

But then I received it again, yesterday.  The very same message!   I have no idea why.  Email is a Mysterious Medium.

Anyway, thanking Mark twice is something he deserves anyway ☺.

Simon


From: Simon Peyton Jones
Sent: 22 February 2016 11:54
To: 'Mark Lentczner' <mark.lentczner at gmail.com>
Cc: haskell-platform at projects.haskell.org; Haskell Libraries <libraries at haskell.org>; ghc-devs at haskell.org
Subject: RE: "Excuse me, I think this i my stop..." - Resigning from the Platform

Mark

I’m really sorry to see you go.  You have played a key leadership role, and have given us a lot of your most precious and inelastic commodity, your own time.

Thank you!

Simon

From: haskell-platform-bounces at projects.haskell.org<mailto:haskell-platform-bounces at projects.haskell.org> [mailto:haskell-platform-bounces at projects.haskell.org] On Behalf Of Mark Lentczner
Sent: 13 October 2015 04:09
To: haskell-platform at projects.haskell.org<mailto:haskell-platform at projects.haskell.org>; Haskell Libraries <libraries at haskell.org<mailto:libraries at haskell.org>>; ghc-devs at haskell.org<mailto:ghc-devs at haskell.org>
Subject: "Excuse me, I think this i my stop..." - Resigning from the Platform

I think this is the right time for me to exit:

The truth is, I still can't bring myself to use a version of Haskell post the Foldable-Traversable-aPocalypse, let alone some future Haskell after the changes now in the works. My personal machines are all still 7.8. My personal projects are all pre-FTP. The Haskell I love to code in, the Haskell I'm passionate about, the Haskell I've advocated for real world use, and the Haskell I like to teach, is 7.8, pre-FTP.

It's not that I'm dead set against change and evolution in a language, or even breaking changes. But FTP and beyond are changes that have lost the balance that Haskell had between abstraction and clarity, between elaborate and practical engineering. I don't see any restraint going forward, so I'm getting off the train.

This puts me in an odd position with respect to Haskell Platform: I find myself building the Platform for a version of Haskell that I don't use. This isn't healthy for either the Platform or me. Hence, I'm resigning as release manager.

I am sad because I believed that Haskell's path to much wider adoption was within reach. Now, especially with the ramping up of the Haskell Prime committee, which seems preordained to codify FTP and beyond into standard, we are approaching our Algol 68 moment: Building a major language revision with less opportunity than it's predecessor.

I'll still see you 'round at meet-ups and conferences. I'll just be coding with an older accent.

- Mark "mzero" Lentczner

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