Lambda the Ultimate

The OS team at Linspire, Inc. would like to announce that we are standardizing on Haskell as our preferred language for core OS development.

We are redoing a bunch of our infrastructure using Haskell as our common standard language. Our first task is redoing our Debian package builder (aka autobuilder) in Haskell.  Other tools such as ISO builders, package dependency checkers are in progress. The goal is to make a really tight simple set of tools that will let developers contribute to Freespire, based on Debian tools whenever possible. Our hardware detector, currently in OCaml, is on the block to be rewritten as well.

There are four of us using Haskell, all CCed on this message.  All of us have been using functional languages for quite some time.  At Linspire, our choices have been OCaml and Haskell. David Fox wrote the hardware detector in OCaml and is now porting it to Haskell.  Jeremy Shaw has been doing various utilities in Haskell for several years.  Sean Meiners recently wrote an application for managing his recipe collection and is now hooked.  I am porting our CD build procedure from OCaml to Haskell.

We are interested in many other uses of Haskell.  The recent discussion about Haskell as a shell interests greatly, for example, as we have all suffered through years of bash code.  We'd also like to make some Haskell bindings for Qt and KDE, though at the moment we don't have a good plan to tackle that problem efficiently.

To date, Linspire (formerly Lindows) has focused on polishing Linux for the consumer market.  I mentioned Freespire, above.  We announced Freespire recently (www.freespire.org).  Essentially it is a more open, developer friendly version of Linspire.  http://freespire.org/about/vision and http://freespire.org/support/faqs have good overviews.  Access through apt, open-source CNR client and many other good things.

I mention Freespire because some of our colleagues were concerned that using Haskell would isolate us from the larger community of developers and make it hard to find new employees skilled in Haskell, should we need to.  From our perspective, functional programming makes us more effective and we think that getting even a few people who know Haskell hacking with us is a better combination than lots of Perl and bash.  I'm not sure I expect anyone on this list to disagree, but still I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Also, Linspire is based on Debian. We've talked a little with John Goerzen who announced his missingH library here a while back.  We've imported it and expect to pass updates back to him as well as any other libraries and tools that he would be interested in includng in the Debian archive.  Also, it seems there are quite a few other libraries out there which are either not debianized or stale, but perhaps that is because I haven't fully caught up with what people on this list have done.  If there isn't a cron job running somewhere that updates an archive with Cabalized libraries and apps, we would like to help set one up.

I will be at Debconf from Sunday, May 14 through Tuesday evening.  If anyone on this list is there, I would love to chat and see how we can help each other.

Clifford Beshers <clifford.beshers at linspire.com>
OS Team Lead
Linspire, Inc.