Haskell2020 is the long-awaited sequel to Haskell2010 — a formal, prescriptive standard of the Haskell language, that all implementations should adhere to. Today we have two previous standards, Haskell2010 and Haskell98, but neither is particularly in-line with the language as it’s written in this day and age. The aim of Haskell2020 is to bring these older standards in line with the way the language is actually practiced.

Today, there is only one real implementation of Haskell: the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). GHC is a Haskell2010-compliant compiler, but extends Haskell via language extensions — explicitly opt-in features that deviate from the standard. In GHC 8.6.5, there are 125 different language extensions, and an analysis shows that 10% of Haskell files in the wild enable 10 or more extensions.

All of this is to say that a good chunk of the Haskell being written in the real world is not Haskell2010 compatible. And the situation is only going to get worse.

It might not be immediately evident to you why this is a bad thing. As excellent a piece of software as GHC is, tying our language to a single implementation is unwise and shortsighted. As long as Haskell is defined implicitly by its implementation in GHC, no other implementation has a chance — they will always be forever playing catch-up.

C++ was in a similar situation in the early naughties; the de facto C++ compiler GCC was the only heavy-hitter in town. While it got the job done, it had some pretty terrible ergonomics — so bad that it spun up a cottage industry of attempting to generate the worst error messages. In 2007, Clang — an alternative industrial-strength compiler — was released, which strove to be compatible with GCC, but also to dramatically improve the ergonomics. This friendly competition has spurred both projects to become significantly better.

And we have seen similar beneficial competition (albeit certainly less friendly) in the Haskell world. Five years ago, Cabal sort-of got the job done for building Haskell projects, but there was this thing called “Cabal Hell” that bit everyone. It got the job done if you knew how it worked, which all the developers did, but the pain was felt by everyone else. Then Stack was released, which elegantly solved Cabal Hell, and just worked. It wasn’t perfect, but my god was it an improvement on the state of the world. In recent memory, Cabal has seen unparalleled improvements in its usability, after languishing for years with respect to usability complaints.

My point? Competition is a good thing, not just for users, but for the health of the ecosystem at large. And by extension, we should look at the status quo of today’s Haskell world with suspicion. And getting a good, prescriptive specification of what Haskell is would go a long way towards alleviating this issue.

So why do I bring all of this up? It’s my impression that the current Haskell2020 efforts are dead in all but name. The official mailing list didn’t see any activity for 12 of the last 24 months. Of the months that did see activity, several of their volumes are measured in bytes. At time of writing, the official Haskell2020 website’s certificates are expired, and have been for two weeks.

None of this is meant to demonize the standards committee. But for whatever reason, it’s pretty clear that Haskell2020 is not going to happen in its current incarnation. After all, 2020 is coming up pretty dang soon!

Forgive the melodrama, but I truly believe that this situation is an existential risk for our beloved language and community. There are already well-founded murmurings of dissatisfaction, and lots of complaints about the lack of good tooling (though regrettably I can’t find any links right now.)

So what’s the real problem here? As a complete outsider — reading between the lines of discussions I’ve had with a few of the Haskell2020 committee members — my guess is this: a lack of leadership. It’s not that the committee members don’t care, it’s that nobody cares sufficiently to overcome the momentum and push the thing through to completion. Furthermore, these people are busy with their own cool projects, and committee work is always a thankless job.

The good news: a lack of leadership is a very easy problem to solve. If you care about this problem, just take the reigns. That’s all there is to it. Anyone can do it. Yes, even you, gentle reader! Nobody needs to elevate you to a position of power. There’s no admissions process. You don’t need to be given any authority in order to take the lead here. This is a thing that everybody wants, but there’s a coordination problem, and the only reason it hasn’t been done yet is that nobody has done it.

If you want more assurance about that: as a member of the GHC Steering Committee, I will personally ratify any reasonable draft standard of Haskell 202x and vote in favor that GHC adheres to that standard. I have confirmation from at least two other members of the committee that they will also do so.

As a rough estimate, the effort involved in Haskel202x is about half a person-year. Most of that will be spent doing unsexy, administrative things like setting deadlines, cajoling the right people for opinions, and writing a big, boring document. Not a lot of fun, to be sure, but very doable. The only challenge here is to not lose motivation for six months.

Should you still have doubts, I’d like to give another example: the GHC Steering Committee. Despite some (fair) criticisms, all things considered, the Steering Committee is a pretty successful organization. But literally the only reason for that success is Joachim’s unyielding desire for it to succeed. Without his monthly emails reminding everyone of the work to be done, and who is responsible for what, the Committee would collapse in three months. Nobody gave Joachim this responsibility, he just took it and owned it. In my opinion, the entire Haskell community is deeply indebted to Joachim on this front.

If all of this sounds inspiring to you, I urge you to take up the mantle and make this thing happen. It’s the first step towards a much better Haskell world, and it’s an amazingly actionable one. You can help change the world for the better, and we will all be indebted to you when you pull it off.