Dear Haskell community,
The three-year term limit of some of the GHC Steering committee members has expired. We are really grateful for the awesome work that Iavor, Richard, and Joachim have done through these years (especially the latter, who has acted as secretary.) As a result, the GHC Steering committee is seeking nominations for 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.
We are looking for members who have 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.
The GHC developers themselves are already well represented already. We seek Haskell users more than GHC hackers.
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 interim committee secretary) at trupill at gmail.com until February 28th. 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,
Alejandro Serrano