Haskell for non-Haskell's sake

[D. Tweed]

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Joost Visser wrote:

> Hi Hal and others,
> 
> We would like to hear your thoughts on the viability of a conference or 
> workshop dedicated to applications of Haskell for non-Haskell purposes.
> 
> On Saturday 30 August 2003 01:39, Hal Daume III wrote:
> > I'm attempting to get a sense of the topology of the Haskell
> > community.  Based on the Haskell Communities & Activities reports, it
> > seems that the large majority of people use Haskell for Haskell's sake.
> 
> This bias seems to exist not only in the Communities & Activities reports, but 
> also in the Haskell mailing lists and in the Haskell-related events, such as 
> the Haskell Workshop. One could easily deduce that Haskell is still very much 
> an academic language, of interest to language _designers_ more than to 
> language _users_. However, the reactions to your inquiry about use of Haskell 
> for non-Haskell purposes suggests that a significant group of language 
> _users_ does actually exist, though their voice is not heard too often.

Personal viewpoint:

I think I see a reasonable number of people asking questions about how to
acheive what they need to in Haskell, which whilst it isn't often
explicitly stated, often appears to be because they've got a task that
they aren't `doing in Haskell for Haskell's sake'. When making your
contribution is spending 10 minutes writing an e-mail (such as this one)
there's no problem making your voice heard, and it's nice think you're
being an active member of a very nice and helpful community.

When it's writing a paper for a conference, which requires weeks of
concerted effort, requires that you (& the reviewers :-) ) beleive you've
done something worth telling other people about, finding funding to attend
the conference (which may be funding which could be used to attend a
conference in an area where you are a specialist), and when your peers in
your `proper subject area' won't be interested in the result of all this
work, it seems natural (though not of course desirable) that most
`pure users' of Haskell don't have enough desire to do the work to make
their voice heard that way.

To put it in context, I wouldn't expect virtually anyone on the list
who work in some area (e.g., Hal appears to work in Natural Language
Processing) to have attended a conference for the language they did a
particular piece of software in, when that language was Java, C++,
Perl, Python (and I know there are conferences for those languages).

This isn't to put anyone off the idea of a Haskell applications
conference as such, I just think that before beginning there should be a
convincing rebuttal of the points above. There may well be one; it's VERY
possible I'm wrong/atypical.

___cheers,_dave_________________________________________________________
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