The future of Haskell discussion at the Haskell workshop, Oct 3, 2002

[Johan Jeuring]

This is a brief account of the discussion on the future of
Haskell at the Haskell workshop, Oct 3, 2002, in Pittsburgh.

After Simon Peyton Jones discussed the copy-right issue of
publishing the report, we had a brief discussion about the
future of Haskell.

The first point raised was that the addition of unsafe
extensions to Haskell, like unsafePerformIO and unsafeCoerce,
goes against the original design requirements for Haskell.
The presence of unsafe extensions makes quick but dirty
solutions possible, for example for problems that need
concurrency. This hampers the development of semantically
clean theories, and makes building tools that reason
about Haskell much harder. Reactions on this point differed:
some people heartily agreed, some other people thought
unsafePerformIO was often just a cosmetic thing, and that
whenever a theory/abstraction/method for an application for
which unsafe extensions are used now is in sight, people
will try to develop it.

Another suggestion was to develop methods for separation of
threads so that you can reason locally about threads.

-- Johan Jeuring