I research and teach programming languages, compilers, and their applications at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. My main interest is in functional and parallel programming, and in particular, in Haskell.
My Twitter handle is TacticalGrace.
Check out my UNSW website.
The final version of the Haskell 2010 edition has been released: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2010-July/022189.html This completes my stewardship of the Haskell foreign function interface specification. It is now part of the language standard proper. The next language feature I personally like to see being integrated are type families, but that still requires much work.
Four years ago the Haskell' Committee was assembled, charged with the task to produce a new revision of the Haskell language standard (aka Haskell 98). There was a lot of enthusiasm and many wild ideas in the beginning, but it turned out that it was hard to agree on the scope of changes and that it was very hard to find a person willing to shoulder the rather large editorial burden that a major revision of Haskell entails.
The Committee finally decided that our only realistic chance of making progress was to break the mammoth task into smaller chunks. More concretely, we decided to evolve the language in small increments with a release every year, while rotating the committee on an annual basis to avoid burn out.[1] Whether this fine-grained evolutionary approach to language design will be successful in the long run remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the new approach helped us to make progress and to agree on a revision for this year: behold Haskell 2010!
[1] Details about The Haskell Prime Process
