Mark P Jones wrote:
> | It has just been announced that Hugs may go into
> | Microsoft Developers Studio
>
> Please remember that one of the main goals with Haskell systems like
> Hugs and GHC is to make Haskell an increasingly realistic choice for
> program development by a wide range of people in a wide range of
> environments. We're not there yet, but that's the goal.
>
> I am not personally involved with the particular project that you
> mention, but I'm sure that the idea is to *increase* (not restrict)
> the size of the Haskell community by making the tools available to a
> wider audience. In this particular case, that means users of the
> Microsoft Developer Studio. It certainly doesn't mean making the
> tools available *only* to users of the Microsoft Developer Studio.
> If you use a different environment, that's fine --- we won't ask
> you to change.
This is, of cause, a positive goal that will benefit the entire Haskell
community.
> Javasoft have shown that you can build portable and popular languages
> with comprehensive and platform-independent libraries (albeit with
> some minor glitches). However, it requires a lot of time and/or
> people --- the kind of investment that is often possible only in
> a commercial environment. From that perspective, perhaps industry
> backing for Haskell (be it from Microsoft, Sun, or any other company)
> would be good for the language ... Not to dominate or dictate its
> future directions, but to support and encourage it to wider acceptance
> and use.
Exactly my point of view. Yes, we do need industry backing. I welcome
any
company, including Microsoft, to the Haskell community - if they will
respect and continue to respect that Haskell is a free language with
freely available interpreters and compilers. But if a a company some day
gets in a position where it can dictate the future development of
Haskell
it will effectively kill the Haskell community. If that company makes
all
the decisions anyway, there is not much point in discussing the future
of
the language as it is being discussed today.
> Think positive!
I will. If the Haskell community continues to be dedicated to the
development of Haskell as a free language we have every chance to
succeed.
Keep up the good work everybody :)
Joergen
