Continuing Simon Peyton Jones' points on the State of Haskell:
> | Standardization
> | ---------------
> | As painful as it may be, I think that we need to formally standardize
> | Haskell via one or more of the standard standardization organizations.
>
> I'm more dubious about this. I have not met a single person who's problem
> with Haskell was that it isn't an ISO std.
Speaking as an employee of the UK national standards laboratory, I would
strongly discourage standardisation unless there is a very good reason
for it. Good reasons are customer procurement requirements or that multiple
dialects are holding back widespread use - neither of these applies to Haskell.
Standardisation of a programming language takes about a decade and is a
soul-destroying process (destroying the souls of both the participants and,
often, the language itself).
The Haskell committee is impressive in having developed a definition of
about the same level of clarity as an ISO standard in a remarkably short
time. In that position, the only concession I would make to the standards
world is to have a look at international character sets, where there might
be something to learn.
Nick North
National Physical Laboratory
