The committee scrutinizes, nitpicks, improves, weighs 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 at
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/committee.rst
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.
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 maintain in
perpetuity in GHC’s code base, to learn, and to deal with 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 seek a balance of background, expertise, and views on the committee.
Membership of the committee gives you the chance to influence the future direction of Haskell, and to serve the Haskell community. 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.
To nominate yourself, please send an email to me (as the committee secretary) at mail@joachim-breitner.de until October 16h. I will distribute the nominations among the committee, and we will keep the nominations and our deliberations private.