what's the goal of haskell-prime?

[Isaac Jones]

jur <jur at cs.uu.nl> writes:

> On Jan 25, 2006, at 9:37 AM, Johannes Waldmann wrote:
>
>> Dear all, in the "mission statement" I read
>>
>>>   We will strive to only include tried-and-true language features,
>>
>> but the current discussion seems to have a wider focus,
>> i. e. it is more of a wish list. Indeed I think that this is a good
>> idea (ask (future) Haskell users what they want)
>> but it might not be the original goal of the Haskell-Prime effort.
>
> Hello,
>
> I have been on this mailing list since yesterday, so maybe this
> has been addressed before.
>
> My first question is: who are the future users of Haskell?
>
> For instance: is this group homogenuous enough to define a single
> standard, or would it be advisable to define various layers in the
> language.

No language can serve all of the people all of the time, but I think
we should just do our best with a single standard.  I think that the
complexity of multiple languages / layers / standards would not be
worth the payoff.

> A compiler may then choose to support up to and including a number
> of layers.  I can imagine a compiler for students to learn
> functional programming with to have seriously different demands from
> the compiler used by researchers to do programming language
> research. I am usually not happy with the fact that novice
> programmers pay in clarity (of type error messages and diagnostics
> in general) for features they won't be using for a number of years.
> This choice can be left up the compiler builder, but I think it
> might have a place here too.

Have you looked at the Helium language / compiler?  It's a
stripped-down version of Haskell for teaching.  Maybe that's what
you're actually suggesting?  I think this is a great idea :)

peace,

  isaac