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There is absolutely no truth to the assertion that the haskell.org management hasn't played fair or listened and responded to suggestions from the community. T

There is absolutely no truth to the assertion that the haskell.org management hasn't played fair or listened and responded to suggestions from the community. These allegations are FUD spread by people who can't seem to be bothered by the realities of large organizations balancing many competing concerns. As near as I can tell these allegations are primarily referring to a pull request by Michael Snoyman [1] that completely removed four existing sections from the haskell.org download page and replaced them with a link to a tool only a few months old written mostly by Michael and others at FP Complete. I think any reasonable person would agree that a pull request like this to a language's official website is completely ridiculous and should definitely not be accepted. In fact, Gershom & co have proven very reasonable because they did eventually add stack to the downloads page [2] after it had more time to mature and became more widely used. Furthermore, Chris Done (an employee of FP Complete who is also associated with this new website) made the underhanded move of revoking his permission [3] for haskell.org to use the web design that he contributed under a BSD license [4]. These are just two examples of a pattern of what I think is pretty lousy behavior on the part of key players in FP Complete that should be taken into account when listening to their rhetoric. Regarding their point about /r/haskell being full of flamewars, from what I've seen the only flamewars there are ones involving the above mentioned people from FP Complete and they are usually the ones doing the flaming. [1] https://github.com/haskell-infra/hl/pull/130/files https://github.com/haskell-infra/hl/pull/130/files [2] https://www.haskell.org/downloads https://www.haskell.org/downloads [3] https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-community/2016-April/000100.html https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-community/2016-Ap... [4] https://github.com/haskell-infra/hl/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/haskell-infra/hl/blob/master/LICENSE

justinlardinois 10y ago
Ugh, that PR discussion is one hell of a pissing contest.
- dry-lane 10y ago
  Oh, it gets worse. https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3lax6y/discussion_thread_about_stack/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3lax6y/discussion_...
  - justinlardinois 10y ago
    I've used Haskell, but not to the point that I've needed anything like cabal or stack, so maybe I'm not qualified to speak on this. But this whole thing is just so silly. The real value in Haskell, to me, seems to be for learning functional programming, since it forces you to use that paradigm. Beyond that, it's just a hobby language. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not worthy of this East Coast/West Coast hip hop-esque schism. Like seriously, the only recent disagreement that led to a major project splitting in half that I can think of is what happened with HTML5. Something as critical to the computing world as HTML is a lot more worth fighting about than Haskell. I feel like new versions of the C++ standard, even when there are big changes, don't have people as up in arms as they are over this.
    - wetmore 10y ago
      > The real value in Haskell, to me, seems to be for learning functional programming, since it forces you to use that paradigm. Beyond that, it's just a hobby language. It's not a bad thing, but I think like you said in the beginning of your post, you aren't qualified to speak on this. Haskell is a very powerful and capable language, and you've basically called it a toy. It's good you've played around with the language, but to say you've built nothing substantial in Haskell and go on to say it's just a hobby language is like me saying I played around with Python and decided its only value is learning the imperative paradigm.
    - cloudhead 10y ago
      It's a hobby language to you, sure, but to many others, it's what they use to earn a living, it's what their companies are built upon, just like any other major language out there. I don't see your point.
    - codygman 10y ago
      > The real value in Haskell, to me, seems to be for learning functional programming, since it forces you to use that paradigm. Beyond that, it's just a hobby language. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not worthy of this East Coast/West Coast hip hop-esque schism. I categorically disagree. Your comment states that Haskell is both good for learning functional programming and bad because Haskell forces you to use the functional programming paradigm (aside: it doesn't). There is also a distinct lack of compassion for those that use Haskell in their jobs or have in the past. > so maybe I'm not qualified to speak on this. Then how do you so quickly move to "Haskell is just a hobby language"?

justinlardinois 10y ago

Ugh, that PR discussion is one hell of a pissing contest.

dry-lane 10y ago
Oh, it gets worse. https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3lax6y/discussion_thread_about_stack/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3lax6y/discussion_...
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  I've used Haskell, but not to the point that I've needed anything like cabal or stack, so maybe I'm not qualified to speak on this. But this whole thing is just so silly. The real value in Haskell, to me, seems to be for learning functional programming, since it forces you to use that paradigm. Beyond that, it's just a hobby language. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not worthy of this East Coast/West Coast hip hop-esque schism. Like seriously, the only recent disagreement that led to a major project splitting in half that I can think of is what happened with HTML5. Something as critical to the computing world as HTML is a lot more worth fighting about than Haskell. I feel like new versions of the C++ standard, even when there are big changes, don't have people as up in arms as they are over this.
  - wetmore 10y ago
    > The real value in Haskell, to me, seems to be for learning functional programming, since it forces you to use that paradigm. Beyond that, it's just a hobby language. It's not a bad thing, but I think like you said in the beginning of your post, you aren't qualified to speak on this. Haskell is a very powerful and capable language, and you've basically called it a toy. It's good you've played around with the language, but to say you've built nothing substantial in Haskell and go on to say it's just a hobby language is like me saying I played around with Python and decided its only value is learning the imperative paradigm.
  - cloudhead 10y ago
    It's a hobby language to you, sure, but to many others, it's what they use to earn a living, it's what their companies are built upon, just like any other major language out there. I don't see your point.
  - codygman 10y ago
    > The real value in Haskell, to me, seems to be for learning functional programming, since it forces you to use that paradigm. Beyond that, it's just a hobby language. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not worthy of this East Coast/West Coast hip hop-esque schism. I categorically disagree. Your comment states that Haskell is both good for learning functional programming and bad because Haskell forces you to use the functional programming paradigm (aside: it doesn't). There is also a distinct lack of compassion for those that use Haskell in their jobs or have in the past. > so maybe I'm not qualified to speak on this. Then how do you so quickly move to "Haskell is just a hobby language"?