FW: Active Haskell development and libraries

[C.Reinke]

[Mark]
> I'm looking forward to reading the next communities and activities
> report.

me too!-) May I inject, though, that it has to be written before it
can be read, and take this opportunity to invite all Haskellers to
make sure their work/tool/group/etc. is covered? If it doesn't have
a designated contact on our topics page, it probably isn't covered
yet. And you don't want to be disappointed when you read the next
edition, do you? 

Perhaps Mark and others may want to contribute brief descriptions of
their situation, concerns, and wishes regarding the use of Haskell
at their place of work?-)

> In particular, I want to reassure myself that there is a lot of
> useful actively-maintained stuff we can use, and more coming. 

Dear tool/library maintainers: 

Pending further developments, the HC&A report project pings are the
best place to let the Haskell community as a whole know that your
stuff is still alive and kicking (as opposed to a dust-gathering web
link no longer pointing to stuff that once upon a time used to work)!

> [libraries and tools page - what's alive, what combinations are
>  known to work, ..] 

I've often argued in the past that the page should be augmented by
last-known-good information (probably one of the reasons why I was
volunteered for the HC&A reports), so I definitely agree. And that
centrally maintained link collections grow out of date is a fact of
life on the web (people use them, but don't contribute updates).

Let's see what we have:

- the libraries and tools are out there
- the list of libraries and tools is there, but needs dedicated
  maintenance, in addition to general haskell.org developments
- John & Olaf have in the past been quite happy to give access to
  haskell.org to those willing to contribute there
- the HC&A reports are meant to capture recent developments and
  current status of all things Haskell, thereby augmenting the
  longer term Haskell Central at haskell.org

and what we need:

- library and tool authors need to make their good work known (the
  twice-yearly HC&A reports are a minimum prompt for updates; more
  frequent updates in other form might be useful)
- someone could ask John for access to haskell.org to keep an eye on
  just the libraries and tools page (adding the info Mark suggests;
  merging in info from announcements to haskell@haskell.org as well 
  as from the twice-yearly HC&A reports; perhaps checking link
  validity once a month)

> to avoid putting people off using Haskell, maybe the active and
> currently-working things should be highlighted and easy to find
> relative to the other things, right on the libraries and tools
> page, given that currently there are a few broken links and
> projects that are practically stalled, 

So there's an important contribution someone could make to the
Haskell community as a whole! Making sure that the libraries and
tools page on haskell.org remains a welcoming and useful front door
representing the state of Haskell software development. Any takers?

> and partly I'm wanting to see what other people think about where
> Haskell is now relative to things like O'Caml from the point of
> view of commercial instead of research users. At least, am I right
> in thinking that more industrial Haskell users are wanted, and
> that it's not meant to be solely an interesting piece of research?

Don't know enough about O'Caml use to compare, but Haskell *is*
being used in industry, some Haskell consultancy is available as
well. We don't want to force people to use Haskell, but those who
want to (and find the tools they need), do. It's just not easy to
get those Haskellers to spend a few minutes to explain their use of
their secret weapon to the rest of us. 

  ] Yes, I'm probably talking about you, dear reader - why not
  ] contribute a brief summary about your commercial or industrial 
  ] use of Haskell to the upcoming November edition of the HC&A 
  ] report?-] Just get in touch with me over the next couple of 
  ] days, please.

[Manuel]
> You surely have a point here.  IMHO what is needed is a system
> that allows library, tool, etc maintainers to add, edit, and
> delete entries themselves.  If these entries are annotated with
> the date of the last update, it also becomes easier to gauge
> whether a project is still alive.  An automatic system might even
> test for stale links and remove or mark them.

Interesting suggestion, and generally I agree that distributed
maintenance is a good thing. But experience has shown that one
cannot expect a Haskeller to write useful tools _and_ be willing to
talk about them at the same time (people don't even update their own
web pages unless you ask them to..). If there is such a system, it
would be worth trying it, but I'm not too optimistic - Haskellers
need to be chased occasionally (demand-driven lazy evaluation:).

Also, someone would need to hand out authorisations, unless you want
to try a completely open system like a wiki, which I wouldn't
recommend for this particular purpose (it's fine for many other
purposes, though, before people start flaming!-). If we want
additional organisation on the libraries and tools page, we need an
additional organiser/maintainer, just focusing on this part. He/she
can then try to move some work to the software authors.

> An alternative to set up our own system would be to use an
> existing one; eg, freshmeat.com.  

There's a unix/linux bias on that particular one, and I dislike
software that only works on linux as much as software that only
works on windows. Such limited software rarely stems from evil
motivations, but often from a limited world-view of the developers
(if they were truly cross-platform, they wouldn't have to single out
unix/linux).

  ..index of Unix and cross-platform software, themes and related
  "eye-candy", and Palm OS software .. On May 1st 2002 freshmeat.net
  incorporated the contents of themes.org (originally founded and run
  by Trae "OctobrX" McCombs) into its database to further advance its
  services for the Linux community. 

Also, knowing that you can find everything Haskell on haskell.org is
nice (and was a step forward from the situation before that).
Doesn't mean that Haskell software shouldn't be publicised on other
sites as well.. 

> The nice side effect of this is that Haskell software, then, also
> pops up in general language-independent searches on freshmeat.

Indeed.

Cheers,
Claus

--
Haskell Communities and Activities Report (November 2002 edition)
All contributions are due in by the end of October!
http://www.haskell.org/communities/