By Michael SnoymanWhen I started working on Yesod (almost four years ago now!), my objective was simple. I strongly believed that Haskell was the best language out there for general development, and wanted to have a full set of tools both for getting web development accomplished quickly, and for leveraging Haskell's safety features. I believed that by having a set of high-level development tools available to us in Haskell, developers in general would be able to keep the rapid development we've become accustomed to, but drastically reduce the occurrence of bugs and simplify maintenance.
Four years later, I still think it is the right decision. The Haskell community has grown, Yesod has blossomed, and I've personally had the opportunity to use Haskell as my nearly-exclusive language for the past two years. I think my beliefs from four years ago have been affirmed: Haskell has drastically simplified maintenance, and I've seen a massive decrease in the number of bugs in produced code. And I don't think I'm alone. Haskell has quickly moved from an obscure research language to a heavily utilized and more heavily discussed language. Yesod has moved from a small project I used for some freelance projects to a major framework with a great team of developers and a wonderful community of users.
What we've done is great. And I want to do more.
So in that vein, I'm very excited to announce that I am taking the position of Lead Software Engineer at FP Complete. FP Complete is a great company, with the goal of driving the broader adoption of Haskell. Haskell has already accomplished so many things, and done so many things right. I believe FP Complete is positioned to effectively push Haskell the rest of the way into industry. Aaron Contorer (CEO of FP Complete) and I have discussed our roadmap at length, and I think the plans he has laid out really address the major obstacles to Haskell adoption. As we start making more information available over the next few months, I think you'll agree with me that FP Complete is providing something truly valuable to the Haskell community.
So what does this mean for Yesod? A lot, actually. FP Complete will be bringing Haskell to commercial users, and Yesod will be a big part of that. FP Complete is very supportive of the entire open source Haskell community, and will be contributing directly to it. I will continue fully in my role as maintainer and lead developer for Yesod. This move to FP Complete will not be taking my focus off of the open source community at all. On the contrary, I expect greater opportunities to be able to make contributions back.
In addition, FP Complete will be providing a number of other resources for the community to take advantage of. We’ll be working intently to lower the barrier to entry to Haskell and Yesod for developers. And part of our solution will include giving existing Yesod developers an opportunity to create components to be used by others.
There's a lot on our plates as we're ramping up for our first product release towards the end of the year. We have a lot of great ideas, and I'm looking forward to getting to share them with you as they develop. I'm also looking forward to continuing to interact with and get feedback from the wonderful Haskell community.