Ian Jackson defends Haskell, and attacks Clean for "obvious reasons"
Clean is not free, etc. :
> 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.
I am not an advocate of Rinus Plasmeijer, but I use, and I WILL USE
Clean, for me it *is* free. I find it slightly preposterous to insist
on the freedom to modify the source code, almost nobody does that.
Millions of people??? Compare those "millions" to this "small bunch" of
users of Windows...
BTW, do you know a reasonable Computer Algebra package free with
sources?
> 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 ?
The fact that there is only one implementation is *NOT THE FAULT OF
HILT*.
You may write your own if you wish, isn't it? The Clean language is not
patented as far as I know.
==
Haskell is wonderful, its authors as well. But the FSF philosophy is a
bit
extremal, and I do not appreciate at all their comparison of the
commercial
attitudes wrt. software with the Soviet tyranny. On the contrary, the
Soviets managed to corrupt in a very harmful way the notion of
"property",
with well known consequences. So, please, let the liberal people live
their life. Don't buy their products if you don't want to (I am with
you!),
but this never-ending criticism is becoming annoying. There is no point
in
throwing offenses, Haskellians at Clean, and Yahoos at Haskell.
===
Please note that
Fran apparently works under Windows only.
The "visual Haskell" project is based on a commercial interfacing tool.
Many Haskell gurus love using "Visio".
If Mark Jones and now the OGI+Yale team who distribute Hugs kept this
whiter-than-white philosophy, they could never make it multi-platform,
because they use compilers whose source code is not available.
====
So, I would have nothing again a commercial implementation of Haskell.
This might promote the language, facilitate its teaching, and contribute
to its development.
Personally I find much more harmful, and even strongly disgusting if
not worse, but the appropriate swearwords I know only in Polish...,
those funny fellows who patent *algorithms*. Especially algorithms
developed during their work in an educational institution.
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France
