[Haskell] Ancient, but still having fun

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Friends,

It's Friday 18 January 2008, which makes it my 50th birthday.  I spent part of the day happily polishing Geoff Mainland's patch that adds quasi-quoting to GHC, and committing it to the GHC HEAD.

I'm happy to say that this is increasingly the story: more and more people are getting involved with making GHC into a better compiler.  Better still, many more people are involved in making Haskell a successful and increasingly-influential language.  I'm boggled by the sheer number of libraries that are announced these days in each issue of the Haskell Weekly (sic) News.  And for the first time I'm getting invitations out of the blue to speak about Haskell at mainstream professional-developer conferences.  Suddenly Haskell is cool.

Ancient or not, I'm still having a terrific time in this community.  When I first became addicted to functional programming, as a result of Arthur Norman's 4-lecture course, and David Turner's SK-combinator papers, I never dreamt of what a wild and fascinating ride it would turn out to be.

Thank you all!

Simon