During the Haskell Exchange conference, Simon Peyton Jones announced the establishment of the Haskell Foundation. The foundation is primarily intended to promote the spread of the programming language. Peyton Jones is one of the designers of the functional language that 1990 saw the light of day.

The Haskell Foundation is a non-profit organization and is looking for nominations for its board to start. Until 11. January 2021 the foundation accepts suggestions by email. An interim board of directors, whose members come from haskell.org, Facebook, Microsoft Research, Epic Games and the universities of Utrecht and Pennsylvania, among others, evaluates the proposals to hand over the work to the permanent board and then to dissolve. Interested parties can also register for two mailing lists: HF-Announce distributes announcements, while HF-Discuss is open for any form of discussion about the programming language or foundation. The Foundation also wants to spread announcements via Twitter.

Functional, clean, unusual Haskell is a purely functional programming language that provides very clear concepts. It has a good reputation for being difficult to learn. At the same time, it is considered to be particularly secure, as the strict specifications prevent some programming errors. As a basis, Haskell has a very strict type system that relates to variables, functions and parameters.

(Image: Haskell Foundation)

Unrestricted immutability applies to all variables: As with constants in other programming languages, the values ​​must not change. Haskell doesn’t know any mutable objects like Java or C ++ either. The development does not take place imperatively as a sequence of instructions, but via functions. The language owes its logo with the Greek letter lambda to the lambda calculus, a formal language for exploring functions that is the foundation of Haskell.

The strictly functional and immutable concept requires some rethinking for those who are used to languages ​​such as Java, C ++, Kotlin, JavaScript or Python. However, it has the advantage that the functions basically have no side effects and thus, among other things, the order of execution can be arbitrary. However, software developers have to think abstractly to create the functions, and the design phase is longer than with languages ​​like Python. The final code is much more structured and mostly more compact, which in turn improves readability and protects against errors.

Facebook sets among other things to fight spam on Haskell and in the summer published a code refactoring tool for the programming language as an open source project called Retrie.

Further details on the establishment of the Foundation can be found in the official announcement. If you want to take your first steps in Haskell, you will find an overview of tutorials and other starting aids in the official wiki of the programming language.

(rme)