[Haskell-cafe] Re: Interest in helping w/ Haskell standard

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 03:39:34PM -0700,
 Isaac Jones <ijones at syntaxpolice.org> wrote 
 a message of 30 lines which said:

> One of the main topics was the perceived need of a new standard,

As someone who is not an academic researcher and not a student in CS,
I would like to express a personal opinion; we don't need a new
standard. To me, Haskell needs more libraries, more users (which means
more debugging and more documentations), more implementations, of
course more real applications (darcs did a lot of the success of
Haskell), so we can read their code, push sysadmins to install
Haskell, etc.

Most functional programming languages have been killed by the "CS
effect": the fact that most users are more interested in exploring new
areas of computer science than in producing code. Lisp and ML were
killed by the explosion of many different and incompatible versions. I
am not interested in Haskell++ or OOHaskell or anything like that.

If people want to standardize things, their time could be, IMHO, best
spent by standardizing libraries (I just recently discovered that
Text.Regex is not standard and my programs do not run under hugs).