[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hoogle and Network.Socket

[Achim Schneider]

"John A. De Goes" <john at n-brain.net> wrote:

> The problem is that PL research is probably not going to stop
> evolving in our lifetimes. Yes, that research needs a venue, but why
> should it be Haskell? Haskell is a good language and it's time to
> start benefiting from the research that's already gone into it. That
> means some tradeoffs.
> 
Why shouldn't it be Haskell?
So then, build an enterprise-style language using it, noone is going to
stop you. Noone is going to stop you benefiting from it, either. You
might have to have to pay the price of a moving target, though, as
people just won't stop innovating. Tradeoffs, everywhere...

> Haskell is already behind state-of-the art in PL research and it
> seems unlikely to catch up (witness the slow evolution of Haskell'
> and the non-existent progress on Haskell2). Of course, I could be
> wrong.
>
Not really, look at e.g. type families, which give you much of the
power dependently typed languages give you while saying "nah, not yet"
to the question of how to deal with non-terminating typechecking.
Haskell walks the line between well-understood and bleeding edge,
leaning a bit towards well-understood, for sanity's and stability's
sake. 

About the H' progress... It's hard to tell how many drops are needed to
make a bucket overflow, especially if you've got no idea what the
bucket looks like. What certainly isn't happening is people taking a
house, trying to overflow a badly leaking bucket.

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