> So if all of you could get your weight together and publish an
> experts' report on how the platform could be improved so that
> your efforts could add value for its customers, that might have
> quite some influence if you do it early enough (ask the Pizza
> shop what it means to be late;-).
>
> Or is it too late already? It would really be a pity to have
> yet another (more or less portable) platform out there that
> featured problems for implementing functional languages by design.
>
<Prepare for rant>
Hopefully that won't be the case. However, I feel uncomfortable with
the whole .NET/C# situation. Like clockwork, MS releases yet another
new product that they claim will change the world. Meanwhile, there is
no C# implementation available, and the entire .NET framework as
described in their various white papers seems so large and complex
that probably only Microsoft will be capable of producing a working
implementation in any reasonable amount of time.
Plus, .NET seems to be built on top of a lot of poorly-conceived
Microsoft "Technologies". One can see the dark shadows of COM in
there in places, as well as other evidence of the NIH syndrome
creating yet another wheel.
Microsoft indicates that C# will not support "genericity", through
even anything as crude as C++'s templates, so it is unlikely that
they will seek to support functional programming languages in the
short term. Perhaps this limitation is part of the impetus for the
Mondrian variant.
When Microsoft decides to stop playing games, and works with the
rest of the developer community to build on existing standards for
their products I will start to pay attention. Until then, I will
not waste one minute of time working to support any of their
nefarious new products whose true aim is to prevent alternative
platforms from gaining widespread acceptance and use.
I sincerely hope that the researchers on this list, and especially
those at Microsoft Labs, will stand firm in the design of Haskell,
and not pollute it with poorly designed add-ons to work with a
poorly-conceived architecture. You will be embarking on a game of
catch-up that you can never hope to win.
<end rant>
Regards,
-Brent
