The Debian community should influence the next Haskell language standard
Fellow Debianers,
I'm helping to organize the process of creating the next version of
Haskell[1], and I really want it to be a language that Debian
developers can use.
The Haskell programming language is more-or-less divided into two
"branches". The Haskell 98 standard is the "stable" branch of the
language, and that has been a big success. A lot of progress has been
made over the last few years in the "research" branch of the Haskell
language. It is constantly advancing, and we feel that it is time for
a new standard which reflects those advancements.
One of my goals is to make Haskell more suitable for "practical"
applications such as those that the Debian community might find for
it. We've come pretty far over the last few years in infrastructure.
We're working to develop CPAN-like and apt-get-like systems for
Haskell. Haskell has been used for practical applications such as
Darcs, an advanced revision control system, and Pugs, the Perl 6
implementation.
I'd like to ask the Debian community to look at Haskell98 and some of
the "research" extensions[2] and give us some input as to what would
make Haskell more attractive to you. I'm guessing that most folks
should be able to pick it up pretty easily, though if you've never
seen a functional programming language before, you'll be exposed to
some new concepts.
I think that the tutorial, "Yet Another Haskell Tutorial"[3] is pretty
good, and you can apt-get install hugs or ghc6 for a compiler or
interpreter. That should be enough to get you started. /join
#haskell if you are looking for help.
Please email me with any comments or questions.
peace,
isaac
[1] Haskell': http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
[2] Some language extensions:
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/ghc-language-features.html
[3] Yet Another Haskell Tutorial: http://www.isi.edu/~hdaume/htut/
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