Steve Tarsk writes ("Clean and Haskell"):
> I just want to say that Haskell is a fat old slow
> dinosaur compared with Clean. Download Clean at
> www.cs.kun.nl/~clean and get rid of your Haskell
> installation.
Without getting into the merits of the languages per se, for me and
many other people there are some serious problems with using a
language whose only implementation is not free software[1].
We're all, hopefully, by now aquainted with the practical benefits of
free software. The FSF at www.fsf.org have a number of philosophical
texts about ethical reasons for preferring free software - look under
`why we exist', for example for `why software should not have owners'.
The operating system I run on my computers, Debian (www.debian.org),
consists only of software and documentation to which I have (or can
download) the source code, which I can use at work as well at home, to
which I can make modifications if I need or want to, and which I can
share (modified or not) with anyone else. The same applies to the
implementations I use of the languages I write in. Millions of people
like me have made the same choice.
Why should anyone want to tie themselves to a language with only one
implementation, where you don't get the source code, where the
provider insists that you may not share it (or your improvements to
it) with others, where you are dependent on a corporation for support
and which isn't available on all the platforms you might work on ?
Thank you for your attention. If people tell me that I'm off topic I
shall shut up.
[1] By free I mean as in `free speech', not `free beer'.
