Quo vadis?

[Simon Peyton Jones]

|  That sounds like we're stuck with the committee we have. In that case,
|  Simon, could you at least pull some strings to have the actual Haskell
|  Report placed in the same repository?

Sounds like a good plan.  If the haskell-prime committee agreed to do this, and it's only a matter of doing it, then you just need someone with commit rights to the relevant repository. I don't know who that is (it certainly isn't me), but if you make them a PR, and ping them by email, it would be easy for them to execute.

Simon


|  -----Original Message-----
|  From: Mario Blažević <blamario at ciktel.net>
|  Sent: 08 October 2018 02:52
|  To: Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>; haskell-prime at haskell.org
|  Subject: Re: Quo vadis?
|  
|  On 2018-10-05 01:05 PM, Simon Peyton Jones wrote:
|  > I think the difficulty has always been in finding enough people who
|  > are
|  >
|  > * Well-informed and well-qualified
|  > * Willing to spend the time to standardise language features
|  >
|  > GHC does not help the situation: it's a de-facto standard, which
|  reduces the incentives to spend time in standardisation.
|  >
|  > I don’t think we should blame anyone for not wanting to invest this
|  time -- no shame here.  It is a very significant commitment, as I know
|  from editing the Haskell 98 report and the incentives are weak.  Because
|  of that, I am not very optimistic about finding such a group -- we have
|  been abortively trying for several years.
|  
|  
|  That sounds like we're stuck with the committee we have. In that case,
|  Simon, could you at least pull some strings to have the actual Haskell
|  Report placed in the same repository? This is a basic precondition if we
|  expect individual efforts to accomplish anything. The minimal steps to
|  actually updating the Haskell Report are:
|  
|  1. write an RFC (we have some already),
|  2. have it provisionally accepted (not entirely clear how - would
|      "no negative votes in 4 weeks" count?), 3. add the modification to
|  the Haskell Report to the RFC, 4. receive the final approval, 5. merge
|  the RFC into the report.
|  
|  Steps #3 and #5 depend on having the report in the same repository with
|  the RFCs. This has been agreed over a year ago:
|  
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|  
|  
|  > If we want to change that, the first thing is to build a case that
|  greater standardisation is not just an "abstract good" that we all
|  subscribe to, but something whose lack is holding us back.
|  
|  Neither an abstract good nor a good abstraction are something Haskell has
|  ever shied away from. I don't know if you're actually asking for a list
|  of "concrete goods"? To start with, every GHC extension that's added to a
|  standard means:
|  
|  - one less item to type in the ubiquitous {-# LANGUAGE ScaryExtension #-}
|  pragma,
|  - one less item to understand for beginners,
|  - one less item whose necessity must be justified to the team, and
|  - one less item of whose future stability the management needs to be
|  convinced.
|  
|  I could go on.