[Haskell-cafe] Gitter Haskell Community

[Ben Spencer]

Hey William,

I'll speak from my experience.

I've noticed that the developers I work with (mostly younger developers) have embraced tech like Github, Slack, and Gitter. When I first tried Slack I didn't like it much but now I understand the appeal.

I remember trying IRC a long time ago. It seemed to work for the time but for whatever reason I didn't take to it.

This part is my opinion, but if a community like Haskell wants to gain wider appeal we have to meet new people where they are at.

Most people know about Github and like Github. A solution like Gitter integrates nicely. Slack isn't a good option because it's designed for businesses in mind. The chat history is limited and you have to pay for extra features.

IRC is a bit aged. It doesn't make it bad but newer developers are interested in the new shiny technology. I've also seen a few posts that in order to get it to work well (ie having a chat history) you have to have a hosted service. That's overhead I rather not have. 

But more importantly, we should meet the community where they're at and that's on Github.

Best,

Ben Spencer

On Dec 07, 2016, at 11:41 AM, William Yager <will.yager at gmail.com> wrote:

What are the advantages of this over the #haskell IRC on freenode? It's very active, usually with over 1500 nicks at any given time.

I generally prefer IRC to any of these hip web chat solutions because IRC is client-agnostic and very rugged against companies folding or deciding they don't want to host a project any more. Basically the only way to kill an IRC channel is through social attrition, whereas any social value built up in hosted chat services might disappear overnight.

The one major advantage of hosted chats over IRC is that they work better with mobile users, but I don't think that's very relevant for haskell dev.

Will

On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 7:34 AM, Ben Spencer <ben.richard.spencer at me.com> wrote:
Why Gitter you might ask? 
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