[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Derek Elkins]

On Fri, 2007-07-13 at 14:33 +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:
> > As we sit here riding the Haskell wave:
> > 
> >    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png
> > 
> > with nearly 2000 (!) people reading haskell-cafe@, perhaps its time to
> > think some more about how to build and maintain this lovely Haskell
> > community we have. 

> - haskell-cafe is meant to be the general forum, that shouldn't change.
>     but i think there is potential to spin off one or two more specialist
>     lists (not too many, or they'll dry out, and not too specific, or they
>     won't attract the haskell-cafe style of membership and content; we
>     also do not want to start cross-postings to keep the synergies of
>     a multitopic forum). 
> 
>     the most obvious one being 'haskell-performance' for shootout 
>     entries, 'how do i improve this?', 'what is wrong here?', and 'why
>     isn't haskell slow?' style of questions, profiling, space&time leaks, 
>     compiler benchmarks, optimizations, transformations, 
>     representations, libs, tools, papers, etc. 

I really like this. ^

>     another possible candidate, judging from mails and blog postings, 
>     might be 'haskell-math', for numeric and algebra libs, apps, tools,
>     classes, theory, and math-related algorithms and data structures, 
>     and general discussions.

This I'm much much less certain or keen about.  Most such questions
start as legitimate Haskell questions.  Furthermore, I think the replies
are often helpful to people who probably wouldn't subscribe to a
'haskell-math' list. (Still it would be nice to have such a venue to
just talk about the relation between Haskell and math.)  I don't think
almost anyone has a problem with such discussions and it seems that many
"non-theoretical" readers enjoy them.