It's become increasingly apparent that between my full-time job and my work on Sass, I don't have the cycles any more to properly maintain Haml. I'd like to pass on the mantle to someone else, but I don't want to do it blindly.
If you're interested in becoming the maintainer of Haml, please demonstrate this by creating a fork of the repo and starting the maintenance process of addressing the issues and code-reviewing and merging pull requests into your fork. What I'm looking for is evidence that you'll be more diligent than I currently can, as well as the ability to both write good code and get good code from other contributors.
In a week or so, if anyone's taken up this challenge and done well, I'll hand them the reins.
- Nathan Weizenbaum, Haml maintainer
I agree that a language should have a "benevolent dictator", but I think Haml is at the point where it primarily needs maintainers who fix bugs/accepts patches rather than mutate the language significantly. That's not to say there aren't features that could be added, but it's not the biggest need at the moment.