Into the Future

by Andrew Boardman

In the previous post I talked about what the Haskell Foundation has been up to for the first seven months, now I want to discuss where we’re heading.

The Haskell Foundation could undertake a vast array of initiatives, so restricting the scope of what we will use our resources on has been a major part of our recent efforts.

Mission

Amplify Haskell’s impact on humanity.

We have selected this mission statement to focus our strategy. It is general enough to make sure we can support the community in the ways we need to, but gives us something to measure proposed strategies against.

Strategic Focus: 2022

Increase the productivity of junior, professional Haskell developers.

For our first major strategy we looked to generate positive feedback loops. Not only do we want to amplify Haskell’s impact on humanity, but we want to improve our community’s ability to make changes that do the same.

This focus translates into a bias for accepting Haskell Foundation Tech Proposals (HFTPs) that relate to tooling enhancements that make junior, professional Haskellers, more productive. We will also create HFTPs as we find compelling use cases.

Update: To clarify, we mean developers who are junior in terms of professional Haskell usage, not in terms of their development career in general.

That does not mean that HFTPs need to be specific to junior, professional Haskellers. We chose this focus because we believe it will generate a broad array of additional improvements that benefit the entire community, while also ensuring that we get a specific set of improvements fully finished. Therefore, as we review proposals, we will prioritize those whose impact on junior, professional Haskellers is clear, but having a broader impact will be a plus.

Emily Pillmore and the Haskell Foundation Technical Track (HFTT) are responsible for both evaluating proposals from the community, as well as incubating ones where appropriate.

Tooling

I just read the phrase “algorithmic attention arms race” by Mark Xu Neyer, and it sums up the state of our world in a really elegant way. The best way to break out of the shackles of consuming culture is to make, and the most leveraged way to make is to produce better tools, to make making faster, easier, and more efficient.

If you caught my Haskell Love talk, you know that I feel passionately about developer tools, the developer experience, and the impact that has on our ability to make an impact in the larger world. To recap the ideas I presented there:

• Polished, functional, professional tooling allows developers to work at a higher abstraction level; the details they would otherwise have to juggle in their brains can be trivially accessible in their IDE.
• A tricky part of learning Haskell is understanding how the concepts fit together, and how they translate into the Haskell run time. An IDE that simulates the runtime and shows developers how their code translates into a running system not only helps programmers be more productive, it helps them learn the language better and faster.
• Making the language (and runtime) easier and faster to learn, understand, and debug, addresses some of the top reasons why Haskell’s reputation for production work can be rough.
• A truly interactive, simulating IDE experience also takes care of an issue for bigger projects: the edit -> compile -> run -> test loop needs to be instantaneous from the developer’s perspective for maximum productivity. We must not allow our tools to interrupt developer flow.

The Haskell language deserves an integrated development environment that takes advantage of its pure, lazy, strongly typed, functional programming fundamentals and provides an experience that delivers an order of magnitude improvement in productivity.

Junior, Professional Haskellers

We believe the sweet spot for focusing on tooling improvements is the workflow of professional Haskellers who are at the beginner to intermediate level.

• Hiring is both a strength and a weakness of our community. The self-selection bias of learning and sticking with Haskell gives a rich talent pool, but smaller than many languages.
• Senior Haskellers are rare, and those with experience translating business needs into production quality code rarer still.
• Managers therefore have their effectiveness gated on their ability to get quality work out of the beginner to intermediate engineers on their team, including their ability to hire them.
• Shortening the time for Haskellers to become seniors and leads both fills the existing talent gap, as well as makes our community as a whole much stronger.

Next Steps

The exciting new phase of Haskell Foundation operations is to identify, in our various task forces and committees, work that we can do to support our strategy, what resources to allocate to them, and get to work!

If you have an idea for a project that fits, are working on one already, or want to get involved, you can email the HF and we will direct you to the appropriate person or task force!