λondon HUG

Duncan Coutts: The Haskell Platform

Here’s the abstract for Duncan’s talk on Thursday:

Some people pick a programming language because it has the best type system, the best facilities for abstraction or perhaps the fastest compiler. Most people however pick a whole  programming platform that lets them solve their problem the quickest or best. A programming platform consists of a language, a compiler, and a set of standard libraries and tools. Other popular programming languages have a standard platform that puts together everything you need to get started.

This talk is about the Haskell Platform. We’ll cover what the Haskell Platform is and who it is for. We’ll also look at the technical infrastructure and the social aspects of how it will be managed. Not all of the details are set in stone. We need to have a discussion within the Haskell community about how the platform will be managed and extended, especially since it needs buy-in from package maintainers. My hope is to use this talk to kick off that discussion.

This is an extended version of the 10-minute talk “Haskell: Batteries Included” that Don Stewart and Duncan Coutts presented at the recent Haskell Symposium.