I don't think it's that black and white.
At the lower end, when the language is controlled by a few, there's
not much innovation poured into the language or libraries, and there
are no tools to support development. As the community grows, you see
much more innovation in language and libraries, and maybe a few
primitive tools. With much greater, the community demands backward
compatibility, so the language itself may only evolve in highly
constrained ways (ways that are usually detrimental to consistency),
but the library space explodes with innovation, and the tools become
extremely powerful.
Personally, I'd be happy to see that explosion of innovation in the
library and tool spaces, even if it means the language itself stops
evolving (for the most part). It will make it a lot easier do use
Haskell commercially, and the innovators in the language space will
find or invent a new target to keep themselves occupied.
Regards,
John A. De Goes
N-BRAIN, Inc.
The Evolution of Collaboration
http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101
On Feb 25, 2009, at 5:52 PM, Jonathan Cast wrote:
On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 17:54 -0700, John A. De Goes wrote:
It's a chicken-egg thing. A Linux or OS X developer tries Haskell and
finds he can write useful programs right away, with a minimum of
fuss.
But a Windows user tries Haskell and finds he has access to very few
of the really good libraries, and even the cross-platform libraries
won't build without substantial effort. As a result, I bet it's
easier
for a Linux or OS X developer to like Haskell than a Windows
developer.
I use OS X exclusively myself, but I'll ensure my first published
Haskell library is cross-platform compatible, because I think it's
good for the community. The more people using Haskell, the more
libraries that will be written, the more bugs that will be fixed, the
more creativity that will be poured into development of libraries and
the language itself.
I don't think this is founded in experience. The experience of the
last
5 years is that the more people use Haskell, the more important
backward-compatibility concerns become, and the harder it becomes for
Haskell to continue evolving.
Creativity being poured into a language doesn't do much good if the
result is the language moving sideways, still less the language
growing
sideways.
jcc
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