[Haskell-cafe] Haskell 2014

[Nicola Gigante]

Il giorno 30/nov/2014, alle ore 15:59, Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> ha scritto:

> The language («GHC Haskell») is evolving quite rapidly, it's just no-one
> is really interested in maintaining the standard anymore.
> 
> I don't think it should disappoint you, unless you're a language
> researcher or compiler writer.

Hi.

I’m a newcomer to the Haskell world, coming from C++ where the standard 
and conformity to the standard is of great value.

Given the tendency of commercial implementors to deviate with custom
and often bad-designed features, having an international standard that has to be
followed by anyone is a great thing (and implementors are unfortunately
very good at deviating anyway).

At first, the existence of the Haskell standard gave me a good impression.
Haskell is not like other languages like python or Java that, at the end, have
the One True Implementation. Haskell has born from the community, and
there always have been a multiplicity of implementations. In this context,
having a common standard to implement makes sense, to aid compatibility.

But Haskell is not like C++ neither. Haskell implementations are not driven
by big corps, and features that deviates from the “standard” are not designed 
and implemented by marketing departments, but they are instead often the
implementation of new and innovative ideas from the research world. 

For this reason, it’s not so useful to crystallize the language to some-years-old
standard when the compilers implementors, users and researchers are so
good at evolving the language in a coherent way.

Here, I think, the point is the community: the language can continue to
grow and evolve in the presence of multiple implementations by ensuring
collaborations between the communities of the different compilers.
If this continues to be done, I don’t think a formal standard, released 
every x years, is needed.

What, I think, needs to be improved, instead, is the way the community
handles the evolving of the libraries used in the haskell world, but I know
that’s a whole other story.

Best Regards,
Nicola