Dear Haskell community,
the GHC Steering committee is seeking nominations for at least two new members.
The committee scrutinizes, nitpicks, improves, weights and eventually accepts or rejects proposals that extend or change the language supported by GHC and other (public-facing) aspects of GHC. Our processes are described at https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals which is also the GitHub repository where proposals are proposed. In particular, please have a look at the bylaws .
We are looking for a member who has the ability
- to understand such language extension proposals,
- to find holes and missing corner cases in the specifications,
- foresee the interaction with other language features and specifications,
- comment constructively and improve the proposals,
- judge the cost/benefit ratio and
- finally come to a justifiable conclusion.
We look for committee members who have some of these properties:
- have substantial experience in writing Haskell applications or libraries, which they can use to inform judgements about the utility or otherwise of proposed features,
- have made active contributions to the Haskell community, for some time,
- have expertise in language design and implementation, in either Haskell or related languages, which they can share with us.
The committee’s work requires a small, but non-trivial amount of time, especially when you are assigned a proposal for shepherding. We estimate the workload to be around 2 hours per week, and our process works best if members usually respond to technical emails within 1-2 weeks (within days is even better). Please keep that in mind if your email inbox is already overflowing.
There is no shortage of people who are eager to get fancy new features into the language, both in the committee and the wider community. But each new feature imposes a cost, to implement, to learn,
(particularly) through its unexpected interaction with other features. We need to strike a balance, one that encourages innovation (as GHC always has) while still making Haskell attractive for real-world
production use and for teaching. We therefore explicitly invite “conservative” members of the community to join the committee.
To make a nomination, please send an email to me (as the committee secretary) at mail@joachim-breitner.de until February 11th. I will distribute the nominations among the committee, and we will keep the nominations and our deliberations private.
We explicitly encourage self-nominations. You can nominate others, but please obtain their explicit consent to do so. (We don’t want to choose someone who turns out to be unable to serve.)
On behalf of the committee,
Joachim Breitner