Lots of the “old gang” that started all sorts of Haskell projects in the early days are gone, true. Some of those left a trail of abandoned packages. The days of early adopters are over and with that maybe some of the exciting flair and heated ML discussions. But overall the community is much bigger now, there’s really no question about that.
Some of what I read here really seems more like nostalgia about those old days. People finally got jobs, researchers moved on to new topics and teachers have their powerpoints already sorted.
Wrt GHC: I totally get the point and I want to highlight this quote
…which I totally agree with.
But at the same time I feel @AntC2 wildly (maybe accidentially) misrepresented the work of the current GHC maintainers. They’re not working on new fancy language features 24/7. If you hang out in the development channels and read the ghc activities reports, you’ll see they’re working on much more, including bugfixing, performance improvements, new architecture support, new GC (did you know?), etc. etc.
Yes, there’s very little pushback on radical language feature proposals (including those that are not even complete, like dependent types)… but this is maybe attributed to some form of pragmatism of keeping the few compiler/language contributors engaged that we have.
I think there are a couple of ideas to discuss, e.g.:
- create GHC LTS releases and don’t spread across too many branches… I feel there are too many new major GHC versions. But if this really reduces maintenance load or not… I don’t know.
-
fork GHC-8.10.7 and simply freeze language features. I guess for most industrial users doing this is still more work than upgrading to a new major GHC version every couple of years. So there would need to be more drive into this direction.