A new era begins for Haskell | Hacker News Reader

A new era begins for Haskell

haskell.org

222 pointsdons23 comments

Every time I make an investment in learning and using a new language, core language developers leaving is one thing I worry about. The reason I've stuck with Haskell for almost 6 years is because the more involved and familiar I get with the community, the more I confident I am in the abundance of very clever people ;-P. I have no doubt the Haskell community will be able to fill the (massive) gap left by Simon.

As the cheesy saying goes

> If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room

I'm definitely not in the wrong room when meeting others in the Haskell community.

I sincerely hope that the Haskell community rises to the challenge to fill the leadership void left by these remarkable computer scientists. What a beautiful language, with such beautiful people speaking it!

just to clear up a possible misunderstanding. only one remarkable computer scientist is stepping down (hopefully not completely): simon marlow.

Oh, I had thought SPJ was reducing his workload, too. I must not have read carefully enough; sorry.

If there's any community that can do it, it's the Haskell community. As you put it, "with such beautiful people speaking it!" it truly is amazing to see the brain the members of the Haskell community have. Hanging out in #haskell is always a pleasure, the genius radiating out of that place...

[disclaimer haven't used haskell for a decade, so this is pure speculation and not intended as any kind of informed criticism.]

is it possible that now would be a good time (just because it is a time when things seem to be changing) to simplify / clean up haskell? what i am wondering / asking is whether more recent additions to the language (type system) are generalisations of earlier features. in which case, maybe the earlier features could be dropped?

is anything like that possible or reasonable? it's a fairly old language, which has evolved a lot, and it stuck me it might be a question worth asking... (something like python 3 i guess, but a bit more meaty)

I believe what you are thinking of is called "Haskell Prime". Haskell' is an effort to evolve the language standard of Haskell, and my impression of it has always been that it's rather analogous to Python 3, except that Haskell seems to evolve much more quickly than Python did, and in ways other than the accretion of new language builtins and keywords.

If you've not used Haskell in a decade, I think you'll find the language has changed significantly since then, but that sometimes the language disguises itself by choosing conservative language defaults that are maximally compatible. If you want to see how far Haskell has come it will require you to use a number of LANGUAGE pragmas to get the benefits of the most recent innovations.

Haskell Prime is not like Python 3 in the sense that there are very few (and no in practice) breaking changes to the language. Haskell Prime standardizes stuff that's already there.

> sometimes the language disguises itself by choosing conservative language defaults that are maximally compatible

Also, they don't like to change their name very often.

Seriously. It matters. Lisp has been Lisp for the past six decades or so. Therefore, someone who learned Lisp in the 1970s thinks that Lisp Is Lisp and therefore hasn't changed, except maybe for a few dialects. (After all, C and Java are just Algol dialects, right?)

The fact Clojure actually has a new name is likely more important to its success than anything else the language creator did for it.

"I don't know what the technical characteristics of the standard language for scientific and engineering computation in the year 2000 will be... but I know it will be called Fortran." John Backus

In 2000 Backus was still right, but not so sure about 2020. Much more of science has moved to other languages, indeed science that uses computation has got broader too, using R, perl, python, all sorts of stuff.

Now of course all communication links are still called ethernet, despite the lack of connection between 10Mb and gigabit, almost nothing in common bar the name.

> is it possible that now would be a good time to simplify / clean up haskell?

No, that is usually the worst time. Don't pile change on change. That doesn't make it easier.

A very special thank you from me to Simon and Simon for creating what I consider to be the coolest language and the smartest compiler out there. Haskell has made me a lot better programmer than what I was before I started out with it.

I really should take a look at the GHC source and see if there's anything I can chip in with. I might have some skills that I could help with, maybe looking at the LLVM backend or something that I'm at least a little familiar with.

I recently wrote an LLVM compiler backend for a toy language. The compiler was written in Haskell, of course (it isn't a coincidence that "research" languages are excellent for writing compilers). It's miles away from what GHC is but maybe I learned some relevant skills along the way that I could apply to GHC development.

Here's my compiler for anyone who is interested: https://github.com/rikusalminen/funfun/tree/uncurryllvm

Discussion on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/14bvtz/the_end_of_a...

Am I the only one extremely worried about Haskell's future after Marlow's departure?

spj's email is wonderful and a great tribute to a fantastic developer, but I'm having a hard time seeing what exactly there is to rejoice about.

And reading deeper into that email, it's becoming clear to me that spj himself seems to be hinting that he is scaling down his involvement in Haskell as well...

I had lunch with him yesterday and I can assure you that scaling down his involvement with Haskell is the furthest thing from his mind. In fact, a number of his side projects have recently reached a point where he will have even more time to contribute to GHC than he has been able to recently.

It's not something I'd get too worked up about. Simon Marlow clearly did a lot of heavy lifting for GHC, but there are a lot of hands in the soup. Most of the big, high-profile things lately have been the work of other people—Haskell Platform, the LLVM backend, not to mention most of the high-profile libraries (Yesod comes to mind).

It's not a great thing but I think even if SPJ left the community has enough of a critical mass we could keep things moving along. It would definitely slow things down for a couple years but it wouldn't be like Linux losing Linus or Python losing Guido.

There's nothing to rejoice about, it's simply a fact. The question now is who is going to step up. If the right people step up in the right way then it could be a net positive.

> Thank you Simon! Facebook is lucky to have you.

anyone have information on this? i hadn't heard and google doesn't appear to know either.

The original story on him leaving microsoft:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818727

and on Reddit, where Bryan O'Sullivan mentions in the comments that Simon will be working on something Haskell-related:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/13m8eu/haskell_leav...

Perhaps you are looking for http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2012-November/02356...

There's also a comment thread here on HN about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818727

Simon Marlow's original letter where he mentions this is directly below Simon PJ's reply in the original link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com