[clean-list] ANN: Haskell Communities and Activities Report (first edition)

[Claus Reinke]

Haskell??? on the Clean list??

Yes. And why not? Many of us try to follow functional programming
activities across the board. So, please, read on.

1. The first edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report
    is now available (PDF,Postscript,HTML) at:
    http://www.haskell.org/communities/
    Enough said about that here, but I hope you'll find it interesting
    (the report doesn't cover all activities yet, we hope to improve 
     that in the next editions).

2. I would very much like to see a similar effort in the Clean Community.
    Even though there is only one implementation, there are many projects.
    You probably all know about Sparkle, Clastic, Generics, etc...
    No? All Clean projects, and I know there are more.

    I've spoken to Rinus recently, and he agreed that it would be nice to
    know more about what people out there actually do with Clean. So
    why not have a Clean Activities Report? Someone needs to do the
    editing and chasing up of summaries (no, I'm not volunteering!-), but
    mostly, it is a community effort - those who would like others to know
    about their Clean-related activities and interests contribute brief 
    summaries, the editor tries to put things together into a useful 
    collective report.  The Haskell version might give you some ideas.

3. There's no reason why people in Haskell-land shouldn't cooperate
    with people in Clean-land on some projects, and there have been
    some productive examples already (Generics are coming to Clean 
    as well, functional textures developed in both Clean and Haskell, 
    Object I/O is coming to Haskell, ..). Activity reports could help
    to foster such cooperations, or just to spread some ideas. As the
    current editor of the Haskell version, I'd be willing to cross-reference.

4. The Haskell activities might give you a reference point regarding
    open-source development. Only a very small number of Haskellers
    do actually contribute to the main implementation sources, but without
    being open-source, most of the implementations would be dead by
    now (thanks to people moving to other places or research topics,
    some groups shrinking, others growing).

    We would certainly not have the variety of activities we do have.

    (Btw, don't expect the implementation sources to be of much better
     quality than your own code - if compiler writers had to fear criticism
     over the quality of their source code, they would never release
     anything! The point of open source is not to point fingers at what
     others have contributed, but to help improve it!-)

Cheers,
Claus