BAL paper available

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| Despite my extremely deep respect for all people contributing=20
| to Haskell, despite my love for the language etc. I begin to=20
| suspect that it has been standardized too early, and if we=20
| (Sergey, other people interested in math,=20
| as Dylan Thurston, myself, etc., as well as people who want=20
| to do *serious* graphics in a functional way) want an adapted=20
| functional language, either we will have to wait quite long,=20
| or perhaps it is the time to invent another language, with a=20
| more dynamic type system, with intrinsic graphic utilities,=20
| and other goodies. For the moment - this is my personal=20
| viewpoint - it might be better to write concrete=20
| applications, and papers describing those applications. Then=20
| we shall perhaps know better what kind of structures,=20
| algorithms, representations, genericities, etc. we REALLY=20
| need for practical purposes.

H98 is standardised, but Haskell certainly isn't.  GHC and Hugs
both have numerous extensions.

So I don't think standardisation is a difficulty.  The availability of
implemention
effort certainly is. But even before that, to implement something one
needs
a good clear specification, and preferably one that several people
subscribe
to (i.e. agree with the need and the design of the extension to meet
that need).

My guess is that the lacks you allude are due not to standardisation,
nor
to implementation effort, but rather to the lack of design/specfication.
If
there are things you want, perhaps you can contribute to a design
for that thing?

(Of course, the existence of a design doesn't guarantee an
implementation;
implementation effort is certainly an issue.  But the absence of a
design
more or less guarantees the absence of an implementation.)

I too have a great respect for the work that Sergey, Jerzy and others=20
have been doing.  Indeed I don't understand the half of it.   I hope
I don't even need to understand it because it's a Haskell library.
But not understanding it leaves me badly placed to know what
the language difficulties are and maybe there are others in my position.

Simon