[Haskell-cafe] Notes from "Haskell takes over the world" BoF at ICFP

Here are the notes transcribed from the Future of Haskell BoF held after the Haskell Symposium last week. -- Don = Future of Haskell BoF Notes = A "birds of a feather" meeting was held at ICFP, organized by Bryan and Johan. We had 30 (?) people in a room, for 2 hours, discussing how to ensure Haskell succeeds. These are the transcribed notes. == Libraries == * Need to encourage special interest groups (SIGs) to form around particular domain areas in the libraries. AI, BioInf, Networking, etc. * Document the SIG process: what resources they have, how you get results. * Missing SIGs for certain platforms: Mac, CentOS etc. * More tutorials on use of Haskell in particular domains. * Keen for Hackage 2.0 quality review tools: embedded wikis, voting * Hackage analysis tools: reverse indexing of the code base. * There is no PVP tool. * Library fragmentation occuring due to type duplication (String, Text, ...) * Focus on intitiatives for common, core types. HP polish. * What is the "Son of Containers" going to be? * Build reports would help the community a lot. Integrated with Hackage. Haddock pages on hackage should be editable wikis (per-top-level function, dvcs backed? record history, captchas. roll back spam, by default assume good contributions) * Need to register patches to packages with lost maintainers. * Belgium Hackathon coming up. * Improve libraries process: esp. for small contributions. * Hackage maintainance: + maintainer timeout. + hackage package clobbering. + tweaks. hackage-local .cabal fixes. * Unclear what the rules for contributing are. Document them! * In particular, document how to contribute to: * ghc * cabal * core and HP * hackage * dockathon == IDEs == * A new ghci. + scriptable, scion-server? + repls on top of ghc-api + ruby repl + .ghci + documentation + hpaste/ghci. * IDE + scion. contributions. market places. + documentation. + EclipseFP, scion? + NetBeans. * Special Interest Groups + as the vehicle for domain projects. + formal process for forming a group. + a small amount of structure for groups + document process for forming a strike team. * haskell.org + polishing the wiki. + wikibooks. + call for sig. * haskell visual design group? + consistent color themes across haskell.org sites. + consistent haskell branding. * community server mailing lists in poor state * Move community more online ? Community services. + google groups + digests. + reply at the right point in the threads. + serious lists. + ghc users. libraries. + announces. + stackoverflow for new questions? + keep refering to SO. + reddit for news? == GHC == * ghc status + 50% split in room on moving ghc from darcs to git. + bug reports and interaction load with ghc + well documented workflow for lightweight changes + heavy weight process for major work. + bugs, tickets. + Simon Marlow "contributions are going up, and process is working well" * Release schedule. + RC at ICFP. + GHC release page. + HP/GHC release. + stage releases. + more clearly announced that ghc will be a beta prior to GHC HP. * HP, uses GHC installers as is. GHC zip. == Teaching / tutorials == * Tutorials. Documentation. + Writing a blog post that is wrong is a pretty good way to get feedback. + Find a forum to ask the question, so the answer is findable. + Ask on SO. + Clojure and Scala communities have active blog spheres. + they love descriptions of data structures + e.g. high fanout trees. + Aggregating the ephemera. + Archives: Haskell Reddit has all the interesting blog posts. -- Haskell Wikibook. * Cabal and integration with other languages. + Easier integration with C. + Higher barrier to entry on the Mac. + Playing well with other languages?