Re: [Haskell-cafe] Correspondence between libraries and modules

[Gregg Lebovitz]

On 4/23/2012 10:17 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote: On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 17:16, Gregg Lebovitz <glebov...@gmail.com> wrote: On 4/23/2012 3:39 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote: The other dirty little secret that is carefully being avoided here is the battle between the folks for whom Haskell is a language research platform and those who use it to get work done.  It's not entirely inaccurate to say the former group would regard a fragmented module namespace as a good thing, specifically because it discourages people from considering it to be stable.... Brandon, I find that a little hard to believe.  If the issues are similar to other systems and languages, then  I think it is more likely that no one has volunteered to work on it.  You volunteering to help? Yes, you do find it hard to believe; so hard that you went straight past it and tried to point to the "easy" technical solution to the problem you decided to see in place of the real one, which doesn't have a technical solution. Brandon, I am very glad to make your acquaintance. I think you have given these issue much thought. That is good. No, I don't think I "went straight past it". I we are trying to address the same issue, but from different directions. If you take the time to look at my history, you'll find that I spent my career bridging the very gap you make so very salient. Here's where we differ, you see an untenable political issue, and I see a technical one. The question of how to support rapid innovation and stable deployment is not an us versus them problem. It is one of staging releases. The Linux kernel is a really good example. The Linux development team innovates faster than the community can absorb it. The same was true of the GNU team. Distributions addressed the gap by staging releases. I fought this very battle in the 1980s with the Andrew system. The technology coming out of the ITC (research community) was evolving faster than users could absorb. Researchers want to innovate and push the limits and users want stability. I've spoken with many in the Haskell research community, and I never heard anyone say "no, we want to obfuscate Haskell so that we never have to make is stable." I think both communities want success. The question is how to build a system that will address both. From your history, I see you are knowledgeable and well known on the deployment side of technology. You also understand what Haskell needs to move forward. So I ask you again, are you volunteering to help? -- brandon s allbery                                      allber...@gmail.com wandering unix systems administrator (available)     (412) 475-9364 vm/sms

_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe