[Haskell-cafe] Project postmortem

Jan Stoklasa (gmail) jan.stoklasa at gmail.com
Fri Nov 18 05:42:08 EST 2005


Hi, 
so sad, so true...
At least haskell ideas sneak into mainstream languages under disguise (LINQ
anyone?). C-Java-C# syntax that business "developers" and their bosses love
so much is mandatory so the result lack the beauty we all know and
appreciate, but it is kinda nice to see functional programming going
mainstream at last. Maybe, "Lambda" is the IT buzzword of next decade :-).

Jan

 

-----Original Message-----
From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org
[mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Simon Peyton-Jones
Sent: 18 November 2005 10:17
To: Joel Reymont; Scotty Weeks
Cc: Haskell Cafe
Subject: RE: [Haskell-cafe] Project postmortem


| 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
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