[Haskell-cafe] Haskell 2014

[ok at cs.otago.ac.nz]

>
> "ISO Standardisation is the kiss of death" -- guess who?

I don't know, and at this point I don't greatly care.
What counts is whether it is _true_.
The existence of ISO standards for C, C++, C#, and
Javascript does not seem to have resulted in the
death of those languages.  Nor, despite Microsoft's
probable hopes, has ISO/IEC/IEEE 9945:2008 resulted
in the death of Unix.  And the kiss of ISO standardisation
does not seem to have even slowed the Unicode monster down.
(Where isJirel of Joiry when you need her?)

Some standardisation efforts may be a bad thing.  The path
to ISO Prolog was marred by years of NIH bike-shedding
which made it years late and still has not resulted in as
much convergence as those who sweated blood on it would
wish.  It's not necessarily ISO that is the problem.  The
ANSI Smalltalk standard with its inconsistencies and sloppy
proof-reading appears to have been a dead letter from its
birth.  16 years later and I *still* cannot expect a simple
thing like opening a file to work the same in the eight
Smalltalk systems I have.

What counts for the development and growth of a programming
language is the community behind it, and Haskell is blessed
with some really amazing people.

However, it remains true that some companies expect to
outlive their suppliers, and that the existence of a
standard gives them some confidence that avoiding things
outside it will reduce their risks.  That's all.