[Haskell-cafe] Aim Of Haskell

[Steve Downey]

well, if Sun hadn't have released a version of smalltalk with a funny
c like syntax, you might have seen some interesting developments in
the mid 90's

On 12/13/06, Claus Reinke <claus.reinke at talk21.com> wrote:
> > The reason why Haskell is academic-centric is that it was originally
> > conceived by academics, and they were interested in doing research
> > into language design and implementation ..
>
> shouldn't we make this "used to be academic-centric"?
>
> > People outside academia who might be inclined to take on some of
> > those more practical questions are just beginning to notice that Haskell
> > could be useful for them too. ..
>
> although "just beginning to notice" may be accurate on a historical scale,
> I have the feeling that the actual development is further along than this.
> at
> least, there have been sufficiently many and active early adopters for long
> enough to make a substantial difference. so those practical questions are
> not being raised, but several of them are actually being addressed.
>
> > It had to happen in a grassroots fashion, and IMO it couldn't
> > have happened until after the rise of distributed open-source
> > development (which, I remind you, didn't start gaining a lot of
> > momentum until not that long ago).
>
> one of the most exciting aspects of Haskell is that pragmatic interest in
> the language has been growing steadily without academic interest in it
> declining in any way. as a result, we have a language that represents
> an interesting mixture of good and useful, although it is not entirely
> clear yet how long this nice balance will hold.
>
> we have had lots of languages that were intended to be well-designed
> (good, beautiful, ..), but never much used in practice, and we have also
> had lots of languages that were intended to be pragmatic (practical,
> useful, ..), without much interest in theoretical beauty. but how many
> languages are there where the two aspects have converged, with both
> communities still actively interested in the result?
>
> claus
>
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