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Comment by laureny | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one extremely worried about Haskell's future after Marlow's departure?

spj's email is wonderful and a great tribute to a fantastic developer, but I'm having a hard time seeing what exactly there is to rejoice about.

And reading deeper into that email, it's becoming clear to me that spj himself seems to be hinting that he is scaling down his involvement in Haskell as well...

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I had lunch with him yesterday and I can assure you that scaling down his involvement with Haskell is the furthest thing from his mind. In fact, a number of his side projects have recently reached a point where he will have even more time to contribute to GHC than he has been able to recently.

It's not something I'd get too worked up about. Simon Marlow clearly did a lot of heavy lifting for GHC, but there are a lot of hands in the soup. Most of the big, high-profile things lately have been the work of other people—Haskell Platform, the LLVM backend, not to mention most of the high-profile libraries (Yesod comes to mind).

It's not a great thing but I think even if SPJ left the community has enough of a critical mass we could keep things moving along. It would definitely slow things down for a couple years but it wouldn't be like Linux losing Linus or Python losing Guido.

There's nothing to rejoice about, it's simply a fact. The question now is who is going to step up. If the right people step up in the right way then it could be a net positive.

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