@human154 suggested I post here after my comment in another thread. Now that I know about individual donations, I just set up a monthly donation. Why? I don’t think I can put it any better than all of the other posts here, which have two themes: (1) Haskell is an amazing language and (2) the Haskell Foundation can act as a catalyst and coordinator of community activities to improve the language and ecosystem. I use Haskell for individual projects and sometimes to help solve some problems at work (I’m no longer a developer, but sometimes need to create small tools to aid analysis). Whenever I turn to Haskell, I’m amazed at the development tools, libraries, etc. that have been created by passionate volunteers. But to ensure that ecosystem we rely upon is there and volunteers are not overwhelmed requires some coordination, and that is one of the goals of the Foundation.
Some things I thing the Foundation could do
- Create a bench of volunteers. It can be intimidating for newbies to start contributing to existing efforts and I think the Foundation could develop some guidance on different ways to contribute to projects (so you don’t feel you have to be an uber-Haskeller to make a difference). Something else that might help is to have something along the lines of Danny Grazter’s series of blog posts on how he approaches reading Hackage code.
- Coordination with some of the companies/individuals who are already producing documentation and training. The Haskell Foundation could help create awareness of these as resources, and perhaps these companies/individuals might be willing to make some of their content available to the Foundation’s documentation efforts (this may involve some negotiation to protect their business models).