Birthday greetings

[Christopher Allen]

Happy Birthday! Haskell is all the better for your work and direction and
we've all benefited thereby. Your work has made computing more enjoyable
for many :)

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 6:22 PM, Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>
wrote:

> Dear GHC devs (all 600+ of you),
>
> It’s my birthday (well it was a few minutes ago, but I became distracted
> by #11379).   I am 58.  GHC is alive and well and, happily, so am I.
>
> However, of late I have found that my GHC inbox, which I used to be able
> to keep under control, just grows and grows.  Mostly this is good; it
> reflects the fact that GHC has lots of users, that they vigorously expand
> up to (and often well beyond) the limits of what GHC can do, and that
> increasingly GHC a lot of developers contributing actively to its code
> base.
>
> But it has its downsides.   I used to be able to keep up with the Trac and
> email traffic.  Trusty techniques like “delete anything mentioning ‘dynamic
> linking’ or ‘Unicode’” would cut the traffic in half.   But that doesn’t
> work any more.   Too many interesting things are happening.
>
> So this email is to say three things:
>
> ·         First,* thank you* to the increasingly large number of you who
> are contributing actively to GHC’s development.   GHC is a big system, and
> no one person can be on top of all of it.   GHC no longer depends on one of
> two people: it depends on all of you.  You know who you are – thank you.
>
> ·         Second,* apologies* to anyone who is stuck waiting for me.
> Although there are large chunks of GHC that I know little about, there are
> other parts that are dear to my heart: the renamer, typechecker, Core,
> optimisation, and so on.  I write code most days and enjoy it.  So I do
> want to continue to play a very active supporting and reviewing role, as
> well as authoring, in these parts.  But I’m conscious that doing so puts me
> in a lot of critical paths.
>
> Here’s a suggestion: if you are blocked on something from me, email me
> directly.   By all means copy ghc-devs if you want others in the
> conversation, but make it clear that you need my input.  That’ll work
> better than putting up a Phab review, or a Trac comment, and hoping I’ll
> see it.  I probably will, but it won’t stick out from other 20 Phab reviews
> that I would like to do.  I don’t promise to turn everything around fast,
> but it’ll increase the chances!
>
> ·         Third, in a vain attempt to at least keep some kind of handle
> on the state of play, I keep an ill-organised *page of tickets that I’m
> interested in <https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/SLPJ-Tickets>*.
> A cursory glance will confirm that there is zero chance that I will attend
> to them all.    So please do pick up some of them and dig in.  Not many are
> trivial; most require some investigation, some design work, some discussion
> of alternatives, etc.  But most of them would benefit from love and
> attention.  If you are looking for suggestions for things to do, that might
> be a good place to start.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Simon
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>


-- 
Chris Allen
Currently working on http://haskellbook.com
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