The history of the language, including major milestones and design decisions, is described in
- A History of Haskell: being lazy with class.
@INPROCEEDINGS{Hudak07ahistory, author = {Paul Hudak and John Hughes and Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler}, title = {A history of Haskell: Being lazy with class}, booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on History of Programming Languages (HOPL-III}, year = {2007}, pages = {1--55}, publisher = {ACM Press} }