[Haskell-cafe] who's in charge?

[Albert Y. C. Lai]

On 10-10-27 06:31 AM, Günther Schmidt wrote:
> this may be an odd question to some, but I think it's actually quite an
> un-extraordinary one.
>
> Who's in charge?
>
> Of Haskell I mean. If there was some alien from Planet Java to land on
> Planet Haskell and demand to be taken to our leader, whom would we take
> him to?

This is in many ways (more ways than I expect) like:

How to do the visitor pattern? If a visitor from Java landed on Haskell 
and wanted to do the visitor pattern?

Of course, to be fair, there are also converses:

How to define infix operators in Java? If a visitor from Haskell landed 
on Java and wanted to define his/her own infix operators?

You just can't shoehorn one model into another. You can't shoehorn one 
language model into another, but more importantly, you can't shoehorn 
one community model into another.

Some people, when confronted with the problem of lacking a library, say 
"I know, a leader would make sure the library happens". Now they have a 
bigger problem.

The leader might instead make sure that the library will never happen.

Python has a leader, no? This leader has suppressed much-needed 
libraries and much-needed alternative implementations. Examples are 
cycle-robust GC and stackless function calls.

There are libraries on Hackage that I am pretty sure a leader of Haskell 
would have killed.

A leader of Haskell who would take "avoid success at all costs" too 
seriously would kill all of Hackage and censor the word "Cabal".