Scarf I Haskell.org: Bridging the Gap Between Language Innovation and Community Understanding
Haskell, a cutting-edge programming language rooted in pure functionality, boasts static typing, type inference, and lazy evaluation. The language's ongoing evolution is bolstered by a diverse array of organizations, including the Haskell.org committee. This committee strategically leveraged the Scarf solution for testing purposes.
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Haskell, a cutting-edge programming language rooted in pure functionality, boasts static typing, type inference, and lazy evaluation. With innate support for concurrency and parallelism, comprehensive libraries, debugging tools, and a vibrant community, Haskell is a cornerstone for creating adaptable, sustainable, and top-tier software.

The language's ongoing evolution is bolstered by a diverse array of organizations, including the Haskell.org committee. This committee strategically leveraged the Scarf solution for testing purposes.

Tikhon Jelvis is the Chair of the Haskell.org Committee. With expertise as an experienced functional programmer specializing in programming languages, Tikhon plays a pivotal role in steering the committee's initiatives.

Challenge: Unveiling Insights into Haskell.org Visitors

The Haskell.org homepage offers crucial information about the language and guidance for newcomers. Eager to understand user interactions without compromising privacy, the Haskell.org committee sought insights into visitor behavior and preferences.

Opting for Scarf's pixel, the committee anchored it to the webpage, gaining concrete insights into visitor interactions without intrusiveness.

Solution: Haskell Engages Its Audience

Founded in 1990, Haskell serves various purposesâfrom education to research and industrial applications. Despite holding a modest 2% share in the programming market, Haskell.org recognizes the importance of monitoring trends and popularity over time. Scarf's pixel has been instrumental in providing a comprehensive overview of audience behavior over six months.

The Setup

Haskell.org adopted Scarf's solutions with a small yet significant step. Initially, the committee representatives integrated a pixel on the homepage to engage with the previously anonymous audience. The entire setup took less than 5 minutesâcreating a new pixel in the Scarf panel and embedding the snippet into the HTML structure of the webpage involved just three clicks. After committing the changes, everything was ready to use. For the first time, the Haskell.org committee could identify not only regular language users but also others visiting the webpage.

The beauty of Scarf lies in its user-friendly approach. Creating pixels, packages, and collections is remarkably easy and intuitive. While the Haskell.org representatives received a demo presentation during a call with Scarf, the user panel's simplicity and thoughtful UX allow users to grasp the full functionality and potential of the solution at a glance.

Result: Scarf Empowers Haskell.org's Insights

Scarf's real-time data has empowered Haskell.org to understand how community efforts resonate in the market, identifying trends and popular regions. The tool helps pinpoint companies actively using Haskell and trace their journey from the main page to downloads. This social proof demonstrates growing popularity and adoption, offering a more insightful perspective than manual GitHub repository data collection.

Key Outcomes

Through meticulous tracking of visitor patterns using Scarf's pixel, Haskell.org has gained invaluable insights into user behavior. The data collected by Scarf facilitates outreach to encourage more companies to contribute to the ecosystem, thereby bolstering its overall development. Noteworthy revelations have emerged, highlighting Haskell's popularity even within unconventional industry sectors, such as government agencies, healthcare software providers, and aviation and transportation companies.

The production environment has proven to be the optimal testing ground for the language's performance and tooling. Thanks to the collected data, Haskell.org now knows whom to partner with, whom to approach for ecosystem contributions, and from whom to seek constructive feedback. Moreover, Haskell.org is now aware of the interest among school and university students. The data collected by Scarf's pixel makes it clear where efforts should be focused when encouraging young enthusiasts of functional programming to develop their coding skills.

Cooperation with universities is a new avenue that Haskell.org hadn't considered previously, but now the organization recognizes its value.