Does the following have any legs as an idea? If it is misconceived, please say so!
The Haskell Report 2010 is (a) authoritative (b) all in one place and (c) acts as a ‘landmark’ (something that other things are described by reference to).
The GHC language edition GHC2024 appears to be (a) the result of community input (what should be included and excluded was debated) and (b) relatively mature (in that it built on the prior experience of creating GHC2021). It also acts as a sort of landmark. The GHC User’s Guide says it is recommend for new code.
For each of the language extensions that are in GHC2024, there is good documentation - e.g. in the debated and adopted proposals that led to the extension, in the latest GHC User’s Guide itself etc., in other documents included in the User’s Guide ‘by reference’ - but not necessarily ‘all in one place’.
‘All in one place’ may be valued: some people interested in Haskell say they look wistfully at The Rust Programming Language book, for example.
Some AI tools seem reasonably good at tasks that involve taking information in one form and recasting it into another form (including following the style/tone of something that already exists) - at least, they seem to get part of the way there before a knowledgable person steps in to finish the job.
Could AI tools be used to help create the better part of a ‘Haskell Report 2024’, which would be (essentially) Haskell Report 2010 plus additional extensions in GHC2024, recasting the style/tone/form/scope so that the end product is consistent with the earlier report?
The intent being not to set anything in stone but to create a new landmark that is (a) authoritative and (b) all in one place.
I can imagine a process:
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For each extension, asking does it have a natural ‘home’ in the 2010 report structure, or does it need something ‘brand new’? You could ask AI that, and then ask the community to critique its suggestions.
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Once the ‘structural’ questions are settled, for each extension, you could ask AI to recast existing documentation into something consistent with the style/tone/conventions etc of the 2010 report. There would then be an open (and human) process to get from that output to something that met the desired quality theshold of the community. (The Haskell 2010 Report providing an example of quality.)
I am assuming that:
(a) this would involve only ‘recasting’ of what already exists in a well-defined way, not ‘origination’ (and so avoiding the sorts of debates that origination brings);
(b) the parts of the community interested in language design (at least, for the most part) does not look at any GHC2024 language extension and say “No, no, no! That has no place in a point of reference for modern Haskell!”; and
(c) AI tools can take out most of the ‘chore’ (unattractive to volunteers) leaving activities that are interesting to volunteers.
I am about to announce a project which will hopefully lead to a new Haskell report pretty soon, you just have to wait a few more days.