Haskell for non-Haskell's sake

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| Since the opening of this thread by Hal Daume 11 (binary), we see a
constant
| flow of interesting contributions/confessions. Plenty of applications,
it
| seems that Haskell is really used in a wider context than we might
think.
| It is a pleasure to read all this.

Yes, it is indeed!  As Jerzy remarks, it is quite hard to get
application papers published in conferences.  I know from personal
experience that it's hard even when the program committee is strongly
motivated to take application papers.  Why?  One reason is that
application papers seldom have a new research result to report -- their
strength is in the integration of language with application.  Another is
that application papers are hard to write; they can easily degenerate
into a "we did this and then we did that" ramble.  It is genuinely
difficult to abstract the re-usable lessons from an application
experience.

Mindful of this, the Journal of Functional Programming *explicitly
welcomes* application-oriented papers (we call them "practice and
experience" papers).  We have tried to articulate the criteria we use
when evaluating them:
	http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/jfp/editorialMay98.html

So let me encourage those who have responded to Hal's call to consider
submitting a paper to JFP.  It really is helpful to the FP community to
learn hard-won lessons from others.  Let's hear them!

(The Haskell Community Newsletter is an excellent complementary forum.
It's ideal for a short "here's what we did" mutual-information
contribution.  Claus has done a fantastic job with the newsletter.)

Simon