IRC channel

Internet Relay Chat is a worldwide text chat service with many thousands of users among various irc networks.

The Freenode IRC network has a #haskell channel, with a high water mark of 288 concurrent clients, as of December 2006. One famous resident is Lambdabot.

The IRC channel can be an excellent place to learn more about Haskell, and to just keep in the loop on new things in the Haskell world. Many new developments in the Haskell world first appear on the irc channel.

Getting there

If you point your irc client to chat.freenode.net and then join the #haskell channel, you'll be there.

Example, using irssi:

   $ irssi -c chat.freenode.org -n myname -w mypassword
   /join #haskell

and you're there.

A screenshot of an irssi session in #haskell

Principles

The #haskell channel is a very friendly, welcoming place to hang out, teach and learn. The goal of #haskell is to encourage learning and discussion of Haskell, functional programming, and programming in general. As part of this we welcome newbies, and encourage teaching of the language.

Part of the #haskell success comes from the approach that the community is quite tight knit -- we know each other -- it's not just a homework channel. As a result, many collaborative projects have arisen between Haskell irc channel citizens.

To maintain the friendly, open culture, the following is required:

• Low to zero tolerance for ridiculing questions. Insulting new users is unacceptable

New Haskell users should feel entirely comfortable asking new questions. Helpful answers should be encouraged with name++ karma points, in public, as a reward for providing a good answer.

History

The #haskell channel appeared in the late 90s, and really got going in early 2001, with the help of Shae Erisson (aka shapr).

A fairly extensive analysis of the traffic on #haskell over the years is kept here

Related channels

In addition to the main Haskell channel there are also:

Channel	Purpose
#haskell.de	German speakers
#haskell.es	Spanish speakers
#haskell.fi	Finnish speakers
#haskell.fr	French speakers
#haskell.hr	Croatian speakers
#haskell.it	Italian speakers
#haskell.jp	Japanese speakers
#haskell.no	Norwegian speakers
#haskell.ru	Russian speakers. Seems that most of them migrated to Jabber conference (haskell@conference.jabber.ru)
#haskell.se	Swedish speakers
#haskell-overflow	Overflow conversations
#haskell-blah	Haskell people talking about anything except Haskell itself
#gentoo-haskell	Gentoo/Linux specific Haskell conversations
#darcs	Darcs revision control channel (written in Haskell)
#perl6	Perl 6 development (plenty of Haskell chat there too)

Growth of #haskell

Logs

Logs are kept at a few places, including

• tunes.org
• meme