important news: refocusing discussion

[isaac jones]

Greetings,

While discussion on this mailing list has been coming fast & furious,
actual tangible progress, even as measured on the wiki, has not been as
fast. 

To remedy this, we propose to focus immediately and intently on a few of
the most critical topics, and to focus all of our energies on them until
they are done.  We'd like to go so far as to ask folks to drop
discussion on other items until these are solved.

The goal of this approach is that we will spend the most time on the
critical (and hard) stuff, instead of leaving it for last.  We know that
we can spend a _lot_ of time and energy discussing relatively small
things, and so we want to make sure that these relatively small things
don't take up all of our time.  We will tackle them later.

The topics that John and I feel are critical, and rather unsolved,
are:
 * The class system (MPTC Dilemma, etc)
 * Concurrency
 * (One more, perhaps standard libraries)

The logic here is that Haskell' will be accepted by the community  if we
solved these problems, and if we go with some of the most robust and
uncontroversial extensions already out there.

We will probably partition the committee into subcommittees to focus on
each topic.

Our goal will be to bring these topics to "beta" quality by mid April.
That is, something that we could be happy with, but that perhaps needs
some polishing.  After that, we may try to pick the next most critical
topics with the goal of having everything at "beta" quality by the
face-to-face we're hoping to have at PLDI in June.

With an eye toward considering related proposals together, we've added a
"topic" field to the wiki, and a new query to the front page which
groups the proposals by topic:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&group=topic&component=Proposal&order=priority

I'd like to ask folks to please bring currently open threads to a close
and to document the consensus in tickets.  Anyone can edit tickets, so
please don't be shy.


your chairs,

  Isaac Jones
  John Launchbury

-- 
isaac jones <ijones at galois.com>