> Then, don t you think that, if we contact software companies, we
> could find some one who would buy the idea? Of course, I would
> not be able to sell the idea, but there are people in the Haskell
> community with a better chance to get commercial and industrial
> support for Haskell. As far as I can see, Haskell is a good product
> (I mean, from the point of view of an investitor).
> It is used in many universities, even in my country (for instance,
> it is used as introductory language in the Computer Science
> Department of my own university). With a little make up, things
> like Zermello-Frankel notation would give a good replacement
> for SQL. A good computer algebra library (like the one that
> prof. R. Malaquias is creating) would make Haskell a good
> scripting language to replace things like Mathlab, Maple, etc.
> I really think that it is possible to lure a software company
> into investing in Haskell.
I think, you (a) underestimate the amount of money needed to
build a "competitive" Haskell system and (b) the amount of
money you could make by selling it.
Re (a): To build a system that is significantly better than
the existing ones, you would need a highly qualified (read,
expensive) design team and a sizeable, above average group
of programmers and they would have to work on this for 1-2
years, I guess. This plus the infrastructure to support
the development team would cost you serious money.
Re (b): For education, I don't think that the features of
any new system could justify the expenses; likewise, for
research, where it is often helpful or even necessary to
have the source code. I'd like to see more companies using
Haskell, but their number is certainly not high enough to
amortise (a).
In short, any company attempting this would be broke soon.
> You could say that it would be better to have groups
> of voluntary programmers (like the people who created Linux
> and GNU), instead of companies like Microsoft. Well, I guess
> that Haskell has atractive features to these groups too. For instance,
> Haskell could be used to produce a free version of Maple,
> Matlab, or even Labview.
What's the problem with current Haskell systems for the free
software/open source community? GHC, NHC, and Hugs
(probably also HBC, but I think, it still doesn't have a
license) are committed to open source - so, I consider them
already being part of that game.
Manuel
