2012/12/1 Tijn van der Zant <robot...@gmail.com>: > I think that there is more to take into account. > Haskell is growing as a language that people use to solve scientific and > business problems. It is starting to become more of a working language, > which is a very good thing of course. But this also means that Haskell > should accommodate the people who are only working with it (not developing > the language) and might not have a clue about the developers of the > language. I'm somewhere in between where I love to read about the > developments (this is my first post) and use it to program robots in my lab > (besides some other languages). > To accommodate the people who just want to use Haskell, we might have a > super-pragma (as previously proposed) and for those gaining skill it should > be possible to subtract pragmas until you have turned them all off and you > can call yourself a Haskell guru. Mind you, I am not one of those, simply > because I have to program in 5 languages for my work. For me, all those > pragmas are not a matter of ugliness, but more an annoyance. For starters it > is even worse. They ask questions such as: What do I turn on? Did I already > find a good pragma tutorial? Why do I need to know about pragmas if it is > already difficult to learn the language? By subtracting the pragmas (or > turning them off) people can learn what they actually do and improve their > code and their thinking about the language. > Quite often I need the get something done, and due to time pressure I do not > always have the luxury to make the code beautiful. And since it is Haskell > (if it compiles it probably does what you want) I do not always care. For > many users, pragmas are a Haskell concept that they can live without in the > first part of their Haskell programming career (and they just turn a load of > them on without even thinking about it what they do, but hey, the code works > now!...) > I think that we should accommodate the 'working programmers' and make their > life a little bit easier, so that it becomes easier to start programming in > Haskell and the language can be put to use by more people. > This does not exclude having a 'pragma prime' that includes proposals for > Haskell' of course. But it would help people starting with Haskell a lot > imho.
Thank you for highlighting the many ways in which pragmas are a problem from a practical point of view. -- Jason Dusek pgp // solidsnack // C1EBC57DC55144F35460C8DF1FD4C6C1FED18A2B _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell