[Haskell-cafe] who's in charge?

[Günther Schmidt]

Hi Greg,

Am 27.10.10 17:56, schrieb Gregory Collins:
> Günther Schmidt<gue.schmidt at web.de>  writes:
>
>> Hi Greg,
>>
>> busy no, merely incompetent. If I was capable of writing a good library I
>> wouldn't have bothered, I'd just rolled it myself and published it. I am
>> capable, giving sufficient time, to write code that will get my email for
>> me. But it's gonna be bad, hackish and ugly.
>>
>> As we are 10+ years now still without one of the most essential libraries any
>> programming language needs I guess it's not that easy. It has just been
>> recently that I wanted to do email via haskell. I was very surprised not find
>> one in place already.
> As Michael pointed out, there are a couple of basic packages, of varying
> levels of completeness. Part of the reason there isn't a "complete"
> solution on par with that of Python's is that sending&  receiving email
> isn't actually as easy as it looks.
>

No argument there :)

> You'd have to deal with several protocols (SMTP, POP, IMAP at a minimum,
> each with SSL variants and half a dozen authentication schemes), dozens
> and dozens of RFC standards (see the full list at
> http://www.imc.org/rfcs.html and allow your mind to boggle), plus all of
> the weird exceptions and workarounds you need to add in to deal with all
> of the broken software that's been in use over the years.
>
> Python has excellent email support *now*, but it wasn't always so, and
> the reason things have improved is that there are a whole lot of
> engineers employed *in industry* who have been paid to work on these
> things for years until they got it right. Guido works for Google, you
> know. I'm not sure how many people are being paid to write Haskell code
> right now (not including graduate students), but I'd wager the number is
> less than 200 *worldwide*.
>

Basically that is my question: If there is someone at the top who has an 
eye on this. That essential libraries come about. I am aware that 
Haskell is a project without industry backing so some things will have 
to happen a lot slower. I'm just wondering if there is someone who 
steers Haskell in that direction.

> There are areas in which we simply can't compete right now and this
> happens to be one of them.
>
> G
Günther