History of Haskell
The History of Haskell (draft)
Simon Peyton Jones, Paul Hudak, John Hughes, and Philip Wadler.
Haskell is over 15 years old now, and the four of us have been writing a paper to submit to the History of Programming Languages conference (HOPL'07). We now have a reasonably complete draft, and would like to invite your feedback on it.
- Version 2 (11 August 2006) of the draft paper in Postscript, and PDF
- Version 1 (14 July 2006) of the draft paper in Postscript, and PDF
Giving feedback
We have to submit a final version for the beginning of September, so it would be great if you could comment before the middle of August. You can do so in two ways:
- Send us email personally (simonpj@microsoft.com, wadler@inf.ed.ac.uk, paul.hudak@yale.edu, rjmh@cs.chalmers.se)
- Add comments to the "Talk" page.
If you like, you can instead send email to the Haskell Cafe mailing list, but we are less likely to follow that closely.
Things to think about
Writing a paper like this is a big task, and one that is very different to the sort of research papers that we usually write. So we would really appreciate your help in making it better. Here are something thoughts and questions that we invite you to bear in mind as you read it:
- We experienced a tremendous tension between
- On the one hand, comprehensiveness and doing justice to all those who have contributed to Haskell
- On the other, keeping the paper "alive". We don't want it to become a boring catalogue of everything that has ever happened to Haskell.
- Please don't feel slighted if we have not mentioned your own fantastic work. Instead, politely correct us. And bear in mind that the above tension means that we just can't include everything.
- We are interested in feedback at all levels: accuracy, coverage, structure, tone, fairness, level of detail; as well as spelling and grammar. Of these, spelling and grammar are the least important!
- The applications section is particularly patchy. One possibility would be to include a much longer list of applications and application libraries, but given in much less detail. Please send us suggestions: the name of the application, who wrote it, roughly how big it is, and (where posssible) a citation of some kind that gives more detail.