[Ambassadors] haskell and promotion !!

[Yaakov Nemoy]

2008/7/24 Satish Eerpini <eerpini at gmail.com>:
> hi everyone ,
> i have this small doubt ,
> the feature list ( the current one ) of Fedora 10 says that it will have
> very good support for Haskell, and this could well be used by us
> (ambassadors) for promoting the release in the other communities which are
> less familiar with Fedora Linux like Scientists , Engineers , etc ,
> i am not sure whether this is the right place for this question but :
> what is haskell , and how improved support for it could really help the
> acceptance of the entire Distro ( Fedora 10 ) ?? well i have not heard the
> word Haskell enough times to even remember the name !!,

Perhaps this is my fault, that I haven't talked it up enough.  Haskell
is also a bit obscure though too.

Haskell is a functional programming language, which is a language
style that is favoured in the scientific community for a variety of
reasons.  Haskell is a research language, created by a committee, and
has been a development ground for a variety of different aspects to
functional programming.  Functional programming in general and Haskell
in particular has also been used in the corporate programming space
with a variety of success.  One such example is the language Erlang,
created by Sony Ericsson which can be found in both cell phones and in
highly parallelized and threaded systems.

"Good Haskell Support" is an effort to create packaging guidelines for
Haskell packages, and to include as many as possible in the Fedora 10
initial release.  The goal is to make sure that Fedora is a platform
that can be used for both the development and deployment of
applications written in Haskell.

This can be marketed in several different ways.  First and foremost,
this is a benefit to universities, since the more languages Fedora
supports and has libraries for, the better it can be used in
educational settings.  Secondly, Fedora can be marketed to companies
and other research labs that regularly use speciality languages, such
as Haskell.  It can also be thought of as one component in provided a
wider base of support for supporting Open Source in general, in that
we can use any source code out in the wild.  Namely, with support for
Haskell, various Lisp dialects, Erlang, Brainfuck, and other languages
that aren't Python, Java, C++, or C, we can run more code.

Let me know if you need more marketing fodder about Haskell.

-Yaakov