[Haskell-cafe] Project postmortem

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| Unless lightning strikes and tomorrow morning I figure out what's the
| deal with the spurious Mac OSX crashes, I think this might be my last
| network app in Haskell. I should really be spending time on the
| business end of the app intead of figuring out platform differences
| and the like.

Joel, I think it's fantastic that you've been pushing on Haskell in the
way you have.  What I learn from your experience is that the *language*
is pretty good for what you wanted to do (esp lightweight concurrency)
but the *libraries* in the area of networking are lacking both
functionality and (more particularly) robustness.

I hope you don't abandon Haskell altogether.  Without steady, friendly
pressure from applications-end folk like you, things won't improve.
It's incredibly valuable feedback.  But I can see that when you have to
deliver something next week you can't wait around for some someone to
get around to fixing your problem.  (They aren't paid either!)  Maybe
you can use Haskell for something less mission-critical, so that you can
keep up the pressure? 

Meanwhile, let me utter my customary encouragement to the Haskell
community out there: please pitch in and help!  Haskell will only break
into real applications, of the kind Joel has been writing, if we can
offer robust libraries, and that depends utterly on you.  Don't wait for
someone else to do it.

Simon