On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Joost Visser wrote: > Hi Hal and others, > > We would like to hear your thoughts on the viability of a conference or > workshop dedicated to applications of Haskell for non-Haskell purposes. > > On Saturday 30 August 2003 01:39, Hal Daume III wrote: > > I'm attempting to get a sense of the topology of the Haskell > > community. Based on the Haskell Communities & Activities reports, it > > seems that the large majority of people use Haskell for Haskell's sake. > > This bias seems to exist not only in the Communities & Activities reports, but > also in the Haskell mailing lists and in the Haskell-related events, such as > the Haskell Workshop. One could easily deduce that Haskell is still very much > an academic language, of interest to language _designers_ more than to > language _users_. However, the reactions to your inquiry about use of Haskell > for non-Haskell purposes suggests that a significant group of language > _users_ does actually exist, though their voice is not heard too often.
Personal viewpoint: I think I see a reasonable number of people asking questions about how to acheive what they need to in Haskell, which whilst it isn't often explicitly stated, often appears to be because they've got a task that they aren't `doing in Haskell for Haskell's sake'. When making your contribution is spending 10 minutes writing an e-mail (such as this one) there's no problem making your voice heard, and it's nice think you're being an active member of a very nice and helpful community. When it's writing a paper for a conference, which requires weeks of concerted effort, requires that you (& the reviewers :-) ) beleive you've done something worth telling other people about, finding funding to attend the conference (which may be funding which could be used to attend a conference in an area where you are a specialist), and when your peers in your `proper subject area' won't be interested in the result of all this work, it seems natural (though not of course desirable) that most `pure users' of Haskell don't have enough desire to do the work to make their voice heard that way. To put it in context, I wouldn't expect virtually anyone on the list who work in some area (e.g., Hal appears to work in Natural Language Processing) to have attended a conference for the language they did a particular piece of software in, when that language was Java, C++, Perl, Python (and I know there are conferences for those languages). This isn't to put anyone off the idea of a Haskell applications conference as such, I just think that before beginning there should be a convincing rebuttal of the points above. There may well be one; it's VERY possible I'm wrong/atypical. ___cheers,_dave_________________________________________________________ www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/ | `It's no good going home to practise email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | a Special Outdoor Song which Has To Be work tel:(0117) 954-5250 | Sung In The Snow' -- Winnie the Pooh _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell