8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production

[atravers]

There it is:

@hasufell

I think some of the tension we experience is intrinsic due to the roots of Haskell and will never truly cease to exist. […] Haskell will always attract people with high appetite for experimentation […]

…it wasn’t always like this:

• (page 19 of 55)

  Multi-parameter type classes were discussed in several early papers on type classes, and they were implemented in Jones’s language Gofer in its first 1991 release. The Haskell Committee was resistant to including them, however. We felt that single-parameter type classes were already a big step beyond our initial conservative design goals […]

  As time went on, however, user pressure grew to adopt multi-parameter type classes, and GHC adopted them in 1997 (version 3.00).

  A History of Haskell: Being Lazy With Class (2007)

• (page 25)

  The Liang, Hudak, and Jones paper was the first to show that a modular interpreter could be written in Haskell using monad transformers, but it required type class extensions supported only in Gofer […]

• (page 29)

  Moving to take a post-doctoral post at Yale in 1992, Jones continued to develop and maintain Gofer, adding support for constructor classes in 1992–93 and producing the first implementation of the do-notation in 1994. Both of these features were subsequently adopted in Haskell 98.

So Haskell wasn’t always the centre of innovation it’s seen as now, with some of that occurring in a smaller Haskell-style language with its own (also smaller) implementation. Based on that observation, here’s a simple idea:

• bring back Gofer for the purpose of innovation and exploration,

• leaving Haskell to stabilise for use in production and education.

Ideally Haskell would then be a subset of Gofer, with new language features being migrated from Gofer to Haskell once they have proven to be useful for more than just (re)implementing Gofer. So there would be a need for Gofer to be accessible to the wider community, but in the manifest knowledge that Gofer will always be “subject to change with little, if any notice” - that would just be “life on the cutting-edge”…