Pinderkent

Although it's still in its infancy, with its first release coming just at the beginning of May 2009, the Haskell Platform is apparently making quite a splash, especially amongst Windows users. In many ways this isn't surprising, as the Haskell Platform offers just what Haskell has been lacking for some time now.

By providing a convenient and standardized Haskell environment, the Haskell Platform helps make Haskell much more accessible and practical to a much wider developer audience. Indeed, part of the reason why languages and platforms like Java, .NET, Perl and Python are so popular and widely used is because they offer a good all-in-one platform so that developers can focus on developing their software, rather than trying to put together a suitable development environment.

Solid platforms of this style are essential for larger, real-world software systems like those commonly fulfilling critical tasks for businesses of all sizes. By having such a platform, especially one with a vibrant community backing, developers can begin to trust Haskell more and more. And in some cases it will become essential to make use of functional programming techniques if we want to effectively make use of the massively multi-core CPUs of the near future. Efforts like the Haskell Platform will help get us there quicker, and will allow us to produce higher-quality and higher-performance software more reliably and efficiently.

As the Haskell Platform matures, I don't doubt that it will garner much support throughout the Haskell community, which will in turn help it improve even further. I'm very interested to see how quickly the Haskell Platform can build momentum, and how quickly it'll be able to help bring Haskell to the forefront of modern software development. Given our current situation, we very badly need the power of a strong, statically-typed functional language. It looks like Haskell may just be the language to provide that to us.

Very recently, Google announced their upcoming Google Chrome OS product. One sentence in particular from the announcement caught my eye, that stating, "The software architecture is simple - Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." While much of the current discussion regarding this announcement focuses on the Web-related aspects of Google Chrome OS, I think this new "windowing system" for Linux is interesting in itself.

The X Window System is no doubt a very useful and effective windowing system in many ways, especially when making use of its network-oriented functionality. But as with everything, there are many things about it that could be better. Some of the main complaints revolve around its performance, resource usage, and complexity.

Although there are currently very few details about the "windowing system" for Linux that we're supposed to be getting with Google Chrome OS, I do hope we eventually see a system that is completely new. This presents us an opportunity to get rid of a lot of the cruft that has accumulated within the X-based stack, in order to produce a lean, efficient, and effective windowing environment. The initial targeting of netbooks, as mentioned in the announcement, will surely help with this.

Other efforts to provide an alternative to X, such as Fresco and the Y Window System, have unfortunately stagnated. But this windowing system would have the support of a major backer, and it sounds like it may achieve a significant market share within a short period of time.

I'm eagerly awaiting more details regarding this windowing system. It may very well have the potential to provide a more enjoyable Linux-based desktop experience, even for those of us who aren't overly interested in the Web-related aspects of it.