Why Another Revision of Haskell?

At the 1997 Haskell Workshop in Amsterdam, some quite serious concerns were expressed about the recent development of Haskell:

The language has been changing too quickly, throwing text books out of date before they are even completed, and making it hard for serious users to keep up.
The language has become more complex, making it hard for beginners to master.
It contains traps for the unwary, simple programs which fail in strange and unexpected ways, with error messages referring to concepts far beyond the beginner's grasp.

Taken together, these concerns throw doubt on whether Haskell is any longer a suitable language for teaching --- and if it is not taught, it has no future.

In response, Haskell will be frozen: the final design will be called Standard Haskell and the language will not be changed again. Of course language experiments will continue, and no doubt continue to be based on Haskell, but designers are encouraged to use different names so that `Haskell' refers to a stable language that can be taught and used with confidence.

However, in the light of the criticisms of Haskell 1.4, it doesn't seem right to simply freeze the language as it is. Instead, John Hughes was deputed to chair a committee to define the final version, with the goal of simplifying rather than extending the language.

Last modified: Wed Jun 18 17:41:34 MET DST 1997