[Haskell-cafe] Small flexible projects a possible niche for Haskell - your statement, please...

[Nick Rudnick]

Dear all,

besides good ambitions in many other areas, it is interesting to see 
that a great number of present Haskell projects is run by a very small 
number of persons and even some parts of the usual developer's toolkit, 
like e.g. Haddock, seem to contribute to it.

Has the Haskell culture produced an environment which is especially apt 
for such development in small groups, possibly with low grade of 
division of labor?

In the last three years at Duisburg-Essen university, very small but 
application oriented introductions to up to 100 rather non-CS centric 
students raised an interest whether there might be a such niche for 
Haskell application -- as there seems to be some evidence that certain 
perceptions of a steep learning curve of Haskell may be in significant 
correlation with an already existing imperative language culture.

In consequence, an 8-student-project with two B.Sc. theses is raised as 
a pilot to examine the possibilities of using Haskell in the combination 
small team with limited resources and experience in a startup setting - 
we want to find out whether Haskell can be an offer competitive whith 
languages like Ruby & Co. in such a setting.

An additional focus is the question inhowfar Haskell might be an enabler 
in allowing a greater extent of change in the organization, like people 
coming and going, or choosing new roles -- here we allow to *disregard* 
the problem of teaching Haskell to innocents to prevent such questions 
from dominating the whole of the discussion: This might be another 
project. Our premise is the availability of a sufficient number of 
people at an mediocre to intermediate level in the environment.

We hope this might be interesting to the Haskell community, as Haskell 
seems to be underrepresented in this regard, and there seem to be active 
prejudices by the imperative community -- which unfortunately in a 
positive correlation with general programming experience, to an 
observing third might lead to an impression that a such rejection of 
Haskell is a matter of computing competence.

Now we -- especially the two students at their B.Sc. thesis, Markus 
Dönges and Lukas Fisch -- are very interested in your quote, possibly

o   aspects of Haskell technology you perceive as relevant or helpful,

o   examples in the Haskell culture / community which might be relevant,

o   experiences of your own and around you, and *especially*,

o   language properties,constructs and extensions you would see as 
enablers in this regard.


Thank you very much in advance... :-)

    Nick