I bring you two personal experimental hypotheses for 2010.

I am a Haskell module author. Constituting my released modules are those ideas which resisted the least when I opened the text editor. But two of them, data-memocombinators and graphics-drawingcombinators have gained some popularity, and I am feeling rewarded having written them.

Most of my ideas functionalize pieces of Haskell programming that are currently imperatively-minded, as you can see with the two aforementioned. But FRP, a particularly greedy such idea has been stealing my tuits away from the others. I have envisaged functional command lines, package management, event handling, persistence, testing, and probably more that presently slip my mind. This brings me to my first new year’s resolution for 2010: Produce! It’s time to start coding these up instead of letting one very hard problem block the solution of moderately hard ones. Kicking off the year, I rewrote graphics-drawingcombinators to have a stronger semantic foundation, becoming version 1.0.0 (thanks Peaker and sinelaw for egging me on!).

My second resolution addresses an irrational fear I noticed a few days ago. The story begins with Hubris Arts, the game studio my friend Max and I started in July. We released our first game in November. We are in development on our second (codename “R4”) and prototyping our third (codename “Evo”). All of our development so far has been in C# with XNA, for a familiar reason: it was the path of least resistance. But as I prototype Evo I see all my beloved functional design patterns leaping out at me from between the lines of imperative blasphemy. So far the implementation seems a great fit for Haskell, but I am uneasy. Some part of me doesn’t believe that Haskell can do it. Haskell’s role in my life so far has been that of a language for beautiful koans and interesting experiments, but not for Real Software. But why not? My only evidence is my own fear.

Thus the second resolution: Believe in Haskell! I have decided to do Evo in Haskell. It is only by tackling Real Software that a language matures — it may not be ready now, but by doing it anyway, we will make it ready. If we can do it, that will be a wonderful success for the language, perhaps permanently parting us from C# von Neumann’s clutches. If we can’t, at least we’ll have reasons why not — ideas for things to improve — instead of unsupported uneasiness and unconfidence.