

A new era begins for Haskell - dons
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2012-December/105041.html

======
LukeHoersten
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.

~~~
X6MW3aQrZU5VKkz
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.

------
thebooktocome
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!

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

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

------
andrewcooke
[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)

~~~
ghc
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.

~~~
derleth
> 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

~~~
justincormack
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.

------
exDM69
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>

------
Cieplak
Discussion on reddit:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/14bvtz/the_end_of_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/14bvtz/the_end_of_an_era_and_the_dawn_of_a_new_one/)

------
laureny
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...

~~~
batterseapower
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.

------
dustingetz
> 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.

~~~
batterseapower
Perhaps you are looking for
[http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2012-November/02356...](http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2012-November/023566.html)

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

