[clean-list] ANN: Haskell Communities and Activities Report (2nd edition)

[Claus Reinke]

Hi there (yes, I know this is the Clean mailing list, please read on:-),

For those who like to follow functional programming activities
across the board, a brief announcement: The

    Haskell Communities and Activities Report (2nd edition)
    is now available (PDF,Postscript,HTML) at:
    http://www.haskell.org/communities/

    It is part of a 6-monthly survey of Haskell-related activities.

Enough said about that here - I hope you'll find it an interesting read.

Last time, I also tried to argue that a similar effort in the Clean Community
would be worthwhile. I'm not volunteering to edit it;-) but I would be very
interested to read it, and as the editor of the Haskell variant, I would be
happy to cross-reference. From my experience, I'd suggest a yearly
interval for a Clean version, but there is certainly enough interesting material
to fill such a report. There were some positive replies to my suggestion last
time, but I don't think anyone has volunteered yet to coordinate and edit.

I'd still like to see all the Clean-related developments regularly summarized
and updated in one easy-to-read place: Sparkle, Clastic, Generics, Clean
presentations at IFL/ICFP/.., functional programming day at Nijmegen,
status of GUI port to Linux?, Clean for OS programming, syntax macros,
status of "concurrent" in Concurrent Clean, what's cooking at Hilt, how
many commercial customers are there, what are they using Clean for, etc.
etc.. I'm not saying editing it isn't work, but for the most part, you need
curiosity, some organisation in your email handling, and the cooperation
of those who work on or with Clean (every project should contribute
one or two paragraphs). And once the dust settles, it's nice to see the
result!-)

Activities reports for more of the many functional languages out there could
also foster cross-language cooperations. There have been some between
Clean and Haskell, some between Erlang and Haskell (yes, I suggested
there that they start such a report as well, let's see whether Erlang or Clean
reacts first:-), Clean and Mercury?, Clean and ??, .. As every language and
community have their own strengths, interests and experience, we should
be able to profit from this diversity, if we know what everyone else is
working on.

Last time, I also suggested that the Haskell Activities Report might give the
Clean Community a reference point regarding the benefits of open-source
development. In the meantime, most of the Clean sources have (at long
last;-) been made available. It is now up to the members of the Clean
Community to prove that this was the right decision, and that it didn't
come too late. A Clean Activities Report would be a good way to
coordinate distributed efforts, and to document and publicize their
results, on a larger time scale, complementing the existing web sites and
mailing list. Over to you..

Cheers,
Claus