I bumped into Matthias Felleisen at ECOOP, and he offered the
following advice regarding Standard Haskell, based on his experience
with Scheme:
1. Don't standardize Haskell until it is useful to the
run-of-the-mill programmer. A minimum set of libraries should include
- URLs [Jon's favorite]
- TCP/IP
- ODBC/SQL interface
- COM interface
2. Make it an ISO Standard
3. ``Scheme standardized two years too soon.''
There is no hope of doing 1 or 2 in the current time frame envisioned
for Standard Haskell, but there might be in two years (see 3).
The reason for creating Standard Haskell was that some people,
especially some textbook authors, cannot adopt Haskell while it
remains a rapidly moving target, and delaying for two years will make that
worse, not better. Nonetheless, I think there might be good reason to
delay Standard Haskell until we can deal with point 1; consider how
Algol 60 and Pascal faired because of their lack of useful libraries.
The best of both worlds might be achieved if we release Standard
Haskell now and commit to releasing libraries in two years; but who
will have the energy to keep libraries up to date for both Standard
Haskell and Haskell 2? -- P
