Humble message of support and concern from an interested newbie

[Cale Gibbard]

The tricky thing is that while a new document describing the language in
detail would be welcomed, it's hard for people to justify doing all the
work that's involved in producing a new document that's substantially more
helpful than the Haskell 2010 or '98 Report. Right at the moment, there's
essentially one practically-usable implementation of the language, GHC
(unless maybe you count GHCJS, and that's sharing GHC's frontend
regardless). So the demand for a document that says what needs to be shared
between implementations of the language is low. Personally, I think
producing a description of what GHC is meant to be implementing, with as
complete coverage of all the extensions as can be managed, i.e. a report,
is something that would be quite valuable. However, that's a very large
task, and most of the people who would be well-suited to produce that
document have other constraints on their time. I don't think there's a
pressing need for a normative standards document at the moment though.

Maybe if some Haskell-using company were to get large enough to devote a
team to working on a new general purpose Haskell compiler for some reason,
or there was a big open-source push for a second Haskell compiler, there
would be cause for a normative standard. But for now, everyone's been more
or less content with working together extending GHC rather than building
something entirely new. (I would have a fair amount of sympathy for someone
wanting to start fresh though. I have my own list of reasons for which I
can imagine wanting to take a shot at reimplementing the language, but I
don't really have the time or energy for it myself.)

For the descriptive side of things, most people get by right now with the
GHC User's Guide, and failing that, there are often papers that go into
much greater detail about the individual extensions. If you want to really
understand the finer details of how those extensions all interact with one
another though, there's presently nothing apart from the compiler itself
(and even then, how they *ought* to interact is a different question from
how they *do* interact). Understanding that and describing it all in a
precise way is a big and difficult task, and it's one whose cost sadly
might outweigh its benefits, especially if the progress toward a new
Haskell Report is any indication.

Even more, I think most would be delighted to see a denotational semantics
for all of Haskell again. But it's one of those things which is difficult
to produce in the first place, and then unless a process were in place to
have it track the implementation, it would almost immediately fall out of
date.

That said, I can imagine there will be a point where the process to write a
new Report kicks back off, I just don't think it's been at the forefront of
most people's minds lately.

 - Cale

On Mon, 8 Nov 2021 at 17:55, Haowen Liu via Haskell-prime <
haskell-prime at haskell.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I hope this email finds you all well. I'm a newbie only starting with
> Haskell very recently, but I LOVE what I'm discovering with Haskell and
> its ecosystem. That's why I was shocked to see that the latest Haskell
> standard is still Haskell2010, and activities on this list has halted
> for 3 years.
>
> I skimmed through the Haskell2010 spec and understand deeply that the
> next Haskell standard will be an equally challenging enterprise. I,
> although yet to be sufficiently familiar with Haskell, want to let you
> all know that I'm hugely grateful for all the work you have done, and
> I'm more than willing to extend any kind of help moving forward with the
> next Haskell standard. If people are still interested in developing
> Haskell202X, and if people need some sort of secretary, editor, errand
> runner, or whatever, please let me know and I can help.
>
> Grateful, concerned, and eager to help,
> Haowen Liu
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-prime mailing list
> Haskell-prime at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
>
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