Please share your stories, your hopes and reason’s for donating to the new Haskell Foundation!
Edit: As suggested in simonpj’s comment below, I extended the title to also invite comments on what would make it worthwhile for you if you haven’t donated yet.
I write a blog post about this, for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet: https://medium.com/geekculture/why-i-support-the-haskell-foundation-1ac3cda1f82f
To summarize, I am supporting the Haskell Foundation because Haskell brings joy to my life, but also faces some community challenges. The Haskell Foundation has the right people and contacts to help Haskell overcome those challenges, and bring everyone together to work toward our common goals. It’s important for individuals to support the Haskell Foundation because it should represent the Haskell community, and not be just a mouthpiece for corporate sponsors. The diversity of Haskell’s community, including professionals, academics, educators, hobbyists, etc. is a strength that shouldn’t be given up lightly.
Chris puts it beautifully. Haskell is an unusual language (purity, bleeding edge types), with an unusual history (long, slow, steady growth), and an unusual community (no corporate sponsor, no single “owner” of any kind).
These are huge strengths, to be cherished. The organic, distributed nature of Haskell community means that many people have a voice; it means that Haskell is our language, not their language; it provides lots of ways to contribute. I love the Haskell community.
But it also makes it all too easy for us to have misunderstandings with each other, and it makes it easy for boring-but-important bits of infrastructure to be neglected.
My hope is that the Haskell Foundation can act as community “glue” to help us work together better. The Foundation will make mistakes, and I hope that you will gently and respectfully call the board to account when it does so. But I know for a fact that everyone’s heart is in the right place, and I think the Foundation is the best thing that has happened in our community for some time. (Yes, even more than finally adding impredicative types to GHC 
)
The title of this thread is “Why did you donate to the Haskell Foundation?”, but I’d broaden it to “What would make you feel like making a regular donation?”.
To support a non-profit regularly we need to feel that we are valued; that our money is being well used; that the organisation run for the benefit of the community; and so on. But that’s all a bit abstract. It would really help the board if you could brainstorm some concrete things that the Foundation could do, that would make you feel that the Foundation truly deserved your support. Some suggestions have come out in other threads already. Please add more!
I wholeheartedly agree with Simon on all of these points, and want to add that anyone in the community should free to reach out to me. We are working on more formal methods of interacting with the HF, but we’re always willing to schedule a chat, write back and forth on our Slack, or discuss ideas here.
We are here to help catalyze the community’s efforts to make things happen faster, and a huge part of that is knowing what would help. Tell us what you think that is!
My reasons for contributing…
I agree with what has been said (above) about Haskell. Additionally I think it is generally an amazing product of engineering…especially that it runs as fast as it does while being as high level as it is. To me Haskell seems elegant and beautiful. I love type signatures and the simplicity of pure functions! Haskell feels like it is built on a solid foundation. I admire, and I’m humbled by the wonderful people who have made Haskell what it is. I want to see Haskell and it’s community thrive and succeed.
I support the Haskell Foundation in the hope it will essentially provide high level management (in a friendly, coordinating, supportive, facilitating sense of the word “management”). I hope that it strengthens and energizes the community. I hope that it will attract funding and use the money to move Haskell forward by financing arduous tasks that would otherwise not be done, or would not be done as effectively.
I want to be able to commit to using Haskell and be confident that I can count on a thriving, healthy ecosystem going into the future.
I’m excited about a “virtuous cycle” of applying donations to make Haskell a better tool, so it’s used by more people, so a larger community is there to fund further improvements…
I hope individual donors like me will together contribute over $600 000 a year. The Haskell Foundation is in its first year, and as I write this we have hundreds of thousands of dollars contributed by corporations but we’ve had less than 20 non-corporate donors. People may think that a donation of $5 or $10 a month won’t make a big difference in the face of the large corporate donations which the Foundation is already getting, but if we had 5000 donors averaging just $10 dollars a month that would be $600 000 per year more to support Haskell! That money could do a lot of good! I think of the corporate funds that have already been raised as handsomely covering the overhead/expenses of the foundation and any further contributions can now be efficiently directed to make improvements that benefit the community!
I know the Foundation is new, but I want to give it a chance in terms of time and money. My sense is that it has found good people and is off to a great start!
I echo a lot of the themes in @cdsmith’s post!
I had been introduced to functional programming and eventually stumbled onto Haskell. It first looked really bizarre, but that’s also one of the reasons why I wanted to understand what was behind it and why the people that used it were so passionate about it. I wrote more about that here: https://aniravi.com/posts/special-about-haskell.html
I’ve learned a couple of different languages but Haskell struck a chord with me. I loved that it challenged how I thought about programming and that there is an effort to discover the potential of what good tools could look like, especially static type systems. I’ve learned other statically and dynamically typed languages, like Java and JavaScript, but felt like our tools could be more useful, expressive, and helpful. Haskell shows that you can have a type system that helps you express yourself as a programmer, which is ultimately what all of us are doing when we write code - expressing ourselves.
I contributed to the Haskell Foundation because as others have already mentioned, there’s a lot of magic in the community that needs some organization and push to get things done, as well as warts to be addressed. It’s incredible how far things have come over the years with primarily volunteer-driven efforts, but I’m excited to see what some organization around key improvements that need to be made can do for the community.
I’m a recent college grad that just started getting paid at my first job a few months ago, but I feel strongly about giving back to open-source, as open-source and free content is the reason I learned almost everything I know today. Haskell’s ecosystem happens to be my primary focus now - that may change in the future, but I think there is something special in this language and the surrounding ecosystem. I only share more about who I am to say that if I can give, you can too.
I don’t get to use Haskell in production yet - but maybe someday I will get to use it or something that’s heavily inspired by it I also don’t have a ton of time to be able to learn and use Haskell, so contributing financially made sense to me - maybe someday, I’ll be able to contribute with code as well.
Kant’s Categorical Declarative.
I’ve used Haskell a lot and find it to be the most enjoyable programming language I’ve used, so I’m donating because I’m hoping the Haskell Foundation will help both with bringing Haskell to more people, and improving the language even further.
It seems like the Haskell Foundation is in a unique position to tackle some problems in the Haskell space that would otherwise receive too little attention to have much hope of being properly addressed, both because it acts as a centralized focal point to bring together stakeholders with diverse interests, and because it has an organizational structure in place that makes it less likely that efforts will fizzle out prematurely.
@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
Lets make this thread a safe space for sharing our own reasons for making donations and also sharing what change would need to happen before we would make a donation.
Hopefully we would just speak for ourselves in as constructive a way as possible instead of challenging what others have written.
Maybe there are things that need to be heard, that need to change. How can the new Haskell Foundation change to also be “your foundation” and also get your support? That type of feedback might be essential.
I really appreciate you all taking the time to post here and I’m looking forward to reading more!
I’m donating to the haskell foundation because I see it as an investment in the future that I want to see.
I love haskell as a language, and I love having it available both a tool to solve industry problems and as a toy and a tool for learning.
Like all communities, the haskell community is imperfect, but it’s also a community full of kind, insightful, and passionate people who should be supported and empowered in their efforts to improve the haskell language and ecosystem.
I donate to the haskell community because haskell is bigger than all of us, and I want to help contribute to an organization that I think can help empower and guide haskell toward becoming all that I think it can be.
I have set up a recurring donation to the Haskell Foundation because I believe that Haskell (or perhaps a language directly inspired by it) is the future of programming.
Haskell is pure: When I call a pure function in Haskell, I know it cannot twiddle parts of the data structures I pass it. I know it cannot bother my user or launch any rockets. And, I know I can call it again, later, and get the same results. This gives me peace of mind and enhances my ability to understand my code.
Haskell is functional: I often think that “computer science” should be renamed “algorithmics” (cf. “physics”): algorithms are the heart of Getting Work Done, and algorithms are encoded as functions. It is thus natural for functions to be storable and composable in an expressive programming language. Doing so has made me a better programmer.
Haskell is typed: Humans and computers have distinctly different skill sets. We humans are good at capturing real-world problems and thinking creatively about solutions. Computers are good at analysis according to a fixed set of rules, even when that analysis is tricky. Leveraging types, we can make a programming language that allows both collaborators – human and computer – show their best selves. The human programmer can think about the high-level details of a solution, while the computer can constantly help the programmer by eliminating impossible (that is, ill typed) solutions.
Haskell is fast: Despite its high-level nature, GHC makes Haskell code run fast. This is an amazing achievement.
For these reasons, I believe Haskell is the language of the future. But if it is to deliver on its potential, it needs the support of a group like the Haskell Foundation. I am thus proud to donate my money, as well as my time, to the foundation and the language ecosystem.
I have set up a recurring donation because Haskell makes me a better developer. I’m just grateful
I’ve setup recurring monthly donation, because Haskell is my favorite programming language.
I’ve had the privilege of being able to use Haskell for living for the past year (after doing Java professionally for 6+ years before that) and it’s been a blast! Apart from all the technical benefits that we all know about I’m deriving a lot of mental well-being benefits from it. I was never able to get the levels of confidence and peace of mind with any other practical backend language. Also it’s very easy to get into pleasant compiler driven “refactoring flows”.
Recently I’m also delighted by the improvements in IDE experience thanks to haskell-language-server (which I’m also proud supporter of via their opencollective).
My only wish around the donation would be improve the visibility of donations so that I could advertise my support for HF e.g. to my colleagues to hopefully attract further donations
Is there a patreon for haskell foundation? I’d like to but for various reasons I don’t use paypal.
@joelmccracken I’m afraid it’s just paypal so far.
It looks like you are not the only one who would be interested in an alternative…There is a conversation in play that revolves around this here:
I’m curious what specifically it is about paypal that you don’t like and what you would prefer, if there are others that work for you besides patreon?
Thanks for mentioning this!
Well, I don’t remember the specifics, but I have seen things that I don’t like. But, very practically, they wont let me attach my bank account to my actual account because I once had it associated with another account. Its been a long time, but they won’t allow it.
If paypay was my only choice, I could try making an entirely new account, and perhaps get another bank account to use with it, but its a lot of hassle.
I already support several people on patreon, so it would be a very convenient location for me to add support for HF.
I don’t have any other preferences besides patreon, but it would probably be less work for me to support HF via just about any other method besides PayPal.
I’ve added: “adding a second payment method for individuals’ donations” to the list of potential initiatives that the Our Foundation Task Force could consider discussing/investigating as a potential recommendation to the HF board.
One of the reasons I have not donated to the Haskell Foundation yet is that US non-profits are not recognized for tax purposes in Canada, and my charity budget is smaller for those causes. Since Haskell users are distributed around the world, I’m probably not the only Haskell user with that kind of concern, but I’m not sure if anything can be done about it; registering as a non-profit in every country in which Haskellers live sounds like way too much work!