[Haskell-cafe] Re: Non-technical Haskell question

[John Goerzen]

On 2004-12-06, Gour <gour-haskell-cafe-dated-1102785921.d04d52 at atmarama.org> wrote:
> However, these projects are mostly done by few individuals working hard and 
> there is also "A Bus Hits Simon Peyton Jones" problem referred during the 
> CUFP workshop.
>
> Any idea how to make a (more organize) community effort to bring Haskell out?

I think the two main things to do that would be:

1. Write Haskell code that has a wide appeal (example: darcs)

2. Fix Haskell weaknesses

Haskell weaknesses are things I've mentioned here before, and refer
generally to documentation and breadth of the standard library (or ease
of finding/installing additional packages).

The Cabal people are working on the library problem.  I am too, by
writing a bunch of code and also integrating a bunch of other code.
(Once Cabal/Hackage is more mature, this integration could probably be
split out.)  Others have written a lot of good code; the HaXML, XML-RPC,
Peter Simons' projects, Ian Lynagh's code, etc. all contain a lot of
code with wide practical use.  All of these projects would welcome more
coders, I believe.

Three of us also have a very rough start on a hands-on, practical
introduction to Haskell aimed at the experienced imperative programmer.

-- John