8.1. A Functional Team

How do you develop a language in a team?

Simon Peyton Jones: We were fortunate in having a shared goal (that of developing a common lazy functional programming language) and having broadly compatible technical agendas. Our paper on the history of Haskell^[10] describes various tactics that we employed (face-to-face meetings, email, having an Editor and Syntax Tzar). We were also unencumbered by having existing users with the accompanying need for backward compatibility. There were no companies involved, thus freeing us from dealing with (incompatible) corporate goals.

^[10] "Being Lazy with Class: the history of Haskell," Proc Third ACM Conference on the History of Programming Languages (HOPL III), http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/index.htm.