[Haskell-cafe] #haskell irc channel reaches 500 users

[Don Stewart]

A small announcement :)

6 1/2  years after its inception, under the guiding hand of Shae Erisson
(aka shapr), the #haskell IRC channel[1] on freenode has finally reached
500 users!

To chart the growth, we can note that the channel was founded
in late 2001, and had slow growth till 2006, reaching 200 users in
January of that year. Since then growth in the user base has been far
more rapid, reaching 300 users in Dec 2006, 400 users in August
2007, and 500 users by July 2008.

This puts the channel at around the 12th largest community of the 7000
freenode channels. For comparision, a sample of the state of the other
language communities, with comments comapred to their status a year ago:

   #php         720
   #python      640 -- up from 5th place
   #perl        620
   ##c++        585
   ##c          530

 > #haskell     502

   #rubyonrails 428
   #ruby-lang   350 -- down from 420 max.
   ##javascript 308
   #lisp        295
   #erlang      178
   #perl6       129 -- unchanged
   #scheme      148 -- unchanged 
   #lua         120
   #ocaml        70 -- unchanged

You can see the growth of the channel over here:

   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/irc

If you've not dropped by the channel yet, feel free to come and chat,
and toss around some lambdas! :)

Cheers,
    Don