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They're doing an AMA right now (11:00am New York time, 2020-10-04)

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/jnwg7i/haskell_fou...

I'm quite surprised of not seeing FP Complete in the list of sponsors.

Anybody knows why is that ?

I think they do more Rust and Kubernetes related things now?

Haskell Foundation spoke to them very early on and continuously throughout the process. They decided not invest in any way, financially or with in-kind support.

Looking at https://www.fpcomplete.com/

FP Complete appears to be downplaying "Functional Programming" and "Haskell", perhaps because they found it scares off customers. At the same time, they are drowning themselves in generic buzzwords.

Haskell is below Rust on their website, despite being later alphabetically. I suspect they are pivoting away from Haskell toward Rust.

Not blaming anyone or pretending to be familiar with what transpired, but that is not encouraging to hear.

The FP-Complete people have had clear different goal than the rest of the community for a while.

It creates some kind of partition, but it's not very relevant. Anyway, it's not very surprising that they don't want to sit on the same committee.

FPC is not that crazy of an organization. Yes, I know in the past there's been drama between its members and other haskellers over stack/cabal etc., but I'd feel more comfortable if the Foundation were able to muster the diplomatic finesse to overcome that.

They are not crazy, they are just of the "I'm doing it!" instead of the "Do you think this is the best?" kind of people. They created some very good stuff (yeah, stack is great, even though I mostly stop at cabal myself), but that's not a committee member attitude.

Anyway, its not a big deal. I even doubt they will have more or less influence over anything because of that decision. It's not like unofficial communication will stop.

> The FP-Complete people have had clear different goal than the rest of the community for a while.

The rest of the community isn't as homogeneous and aligned as one might think either.

I don't think it's a bad thing. Like them or not, they have a somewhat controversial history; a lot of people worried that their projects would fork the ecosystem, or give them too much control of it - I wouldn't be surprised if they decided that it would be better for the foundation's goal of being a community effort to not be seen as having a heavy hand in it. Some people have expressed similar concerns about Facebook and IOHK as well, just from the financial influence they might have, even though their haskell projects haven't been as close to critical infrastructure as FPComplete's have.

"it embodies a radical and elegant attack on the entire enterprise of writing software"

An "attack"? Jeez

It's academic language. It's common to read in a paper that a piece of research is an "attack" on a particular problem. This language could probably stand to be changed for a more generalist audience.

Academics attack problems, not areas of endeavor.

Anyway, the language shows how disconnected the authors are from the community they are trying to join. It may be for the best to wear that on their sleeve instead of misleading people.

The authors are a mixture of academics and industry professionals and they are already part of the community. The statement could do with a bit of copy editing.

The sponsors are IOHK, Tweag, and Well Typed, with SPJ giving an opening talk. Kevin Hammond and Phil Wadler work at IOHK. That basically is Haskell.

It's not academic language, it's tech evangelist language. If you've been in the tech industry you hear it all the time as people try to sell their software/platform/stack/etc to you. Nothing wrong with that. People passionate about their tech should be colorful with their language.

Perhaps, but it's an original quotation from Simon Peyton Jones and he's typically thought of more as an academic than a tech evangelist.

If you watch an SPJ conference talk, this sort of language is par for the course. He's very energetic and occasionally hyperbolic, often using very engaging rhetoric to make his talks fun and catchy. I can 100% imagine him saying the quoted line out loud and it sounds just fine, but written in text without his emphasis makes it seem much more like an evangelist than he really is.

It needs to be a video of SPJ to do it justice

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