4 ms·

Does down vote mean "disagree" now? This message may not be what we want to hear, but it seems like a legit comment.

by jbjohns 17y ago

kunley 17y ago
Yeah it's a bit sad if people really downvote like that. Anyway I'd like to have another point for the people who may think I desecrated holy shrine of Haskell. It's a quite long response and may seem like bashing but there's a conclusion at the end, so if you'd like to downvote please read to the end at least. GHC is very nice piece of high-tech. I like coding in it and I am looking forward to have new cases when it would be the right choice. But there are not many, in my case. Some of the difficulties are in the people's attitude which determines the quality of tools, docs and stuff. Most coders don't have big expectations: apart from the toolchain to create the code they need a platform to share the pieces of code they create. Such platform can be loved or hated (Gems, CPAN are mostly loved, Maven is mostly hated). What do we have here in Haskell world? Cabal, pretty coll stuff, except of one thing: upgrade is broken, so you have to eventually take care of your packages by hand. So it started great, but the actual implementation didn't catch some quality and nobody seems to care. Next thing, a bigger piece of code: Darcs. Great idea, had some performance issues, probably fixed recently. Well it seems that at the time they were fixed lots of people didn't care as they were using git already. Yeah, git, whose manpage says it's "the stupid content tracker" and it really is. It has nothing like theory of patches which finds the coupling of code changes automagically. But git established some good practices which actually enable people to manage code changes in a very sophisticated way, even if these are crude hacks the end user doesn't see it. So git won. Worse is better? Maybe just pragmatic is better? Now the cited Happstack & macid. Another cool piece of high tech which seems a bit unfinished (those limits and scalability issues). it's perfectly ok that something is unfinished. In fact, it's great that the authors were kind enough to share their hard work. But let's look what's the general attitude towards fixing the issues. It isn't: "let us help get rid of these issues". It's: "There are issues and I don't care, and you shouldn't care too". WTF? Do you see a common pattern in those 3 examples? - great theoretical idea - nice implementation, but reached some limit - "we left the rest as an exercise", "we really don't care", "it's cool already because it's Haskell" Got it? Looks like if you want to participate in improving the actual Haskell stuff you have no choice but accept such attitude. Which is unacceptable for many coders around, I guess. If you ask me, I tried, but was turned off. I can sacrifice my time for learning state monads as the knowledge gained will benefit me anyway, but I don't want to waste my time struggling with people's defeatist attitude. Now the political incorrect rant ends. You can start breathing normally ;)
- dons 17y ago
  http://xmonad.org http://xmonad.org http://gitit.net http://gitit.net

Does down vote mean "disagree" now? This message may not be what we want to hear, but it seems like a legit comment.

by jbjohns 17y ago

Does down vote mean "disagree" now? This message may not be what we want to hear, but it seems like a legit comment.

Yeah it's a bit sad if people really downvote like that. Anyway I'd like to have another point for the people who may think I desecrated holy shrine of Haskell. It's a quite long response and may seem like bashing but there's a conclusion at the end, so if you'd like to downvote please read to the end at least. GHC is very nice piece of high-tech. I like coding in it and I am looking forward to have new cases when it would be the right choice. But there are not many, in my case. Some of the difficulties are in the people's attitude which determines the quality of tools, docs and stuff. Most coders don't have big expectations: apart from the toolchain to create the code they need a platform to share the pieces of code they create. Such platform can be loved or hated (Gems, CPAN are mostly loved, Maven is mostly hated). What do we have here in Haskell world? Cabal, pretty coll stuff, except of one thing: upgrade is broken, so you have to eventually take care of your packages by hand. So it started great, but the actual implementation didn't catch some quality and nobody seems to care. Next thing, a bigger piece of code: Darcs. Great idea, had some performance issues, probably fixed recently. Well it seems that at the time they were fixed lots of people didn't care as they were using git already. Yeah, git, whose manpage says it's "the stupid content tracker" and it really is. It has nothing like theory of patches which finds the coupling of code changes automagically. But git established some good practices which actually enable people to manage code changes in a very sophisticated way, even if these are crude hacks the end user doesn't see it. So git won. Worse is better? Maybe just pragmatic is better? Now the cited Happstack & macid. Another cool piece of high tech which seems a bit unfinished (those limits and scalability issues). it's perfectly ok that something is unfinished. In fact, it's great that the authors were kind enough to share their hard work. But let's look what's the general attitude towards fixing the issues. It isn't: "let us help get rid of these issues". It's: "There are issues and I don't care, and you shouldn't care too". WTF? Do you see a common pattern in those 3 examples? - great theoretical idea - nice implementation, but reached some limit - "we left the rest as an exercise", "we really don't care", "it's cool already because it's Haskell" Got it? Looks like if you want to participate in improving the actual Haskell stuff you have no choice but accept such attitude. Which is unacceptable for many coders around, I guess. If you ask me, I tried, but was turned off. I can sacrifice my time for learning state monads as the knowledge gained will benefit me anyway, but I don't want to waste my time struggling with people's defeatist attitude. Now the political incorrect rant ends. You can start breathing normally ;)

dons 17y ago
http://xmonad.org http://xmonad.org http://gitit.net http://gitit.net