possible readline license problem with ghc and -package util

[Eray Ozkural]

On Thursday 13 June 2002 12:18, John Meacham wrote:
> honestly, if microsoft decided to release 'Visual Haskell' and pulled
> the development away from ghc, the resulting rise in haskell popularity
> and the size of community would probably cause more than enough random
> programmers to take a serious interest in contributing to the free
> projects to make up for it. In fact, i could think of nothing better
> (from a pragmatic point of view) for helping haskells acceptance.

Suffer the code. This is a really controversial and amusing point but may I 
suggest that Haskell is so far removed from the reality of "Visual" 
programmers?

I think we are referring to the same bunch who think that Visual C++ is a very 
advanced form of C++, that you can construct programs just by pointing and 
clicking? That same crowd that would take very long to tell what a linker or 
intermediate representation is? And that same crowd who think that writing a 
GUI program with MFC is the job of a guru while they study for months the 
extremely advanced ASCII TREE language XML? The same crowd that think 
programming "languages" consist of Visual This and Visual That? They 
literally think the GUI builder and "class wizard" of the IDE *is* the 
language.

It would take even a LISP veteran some weeks to get used to the concept of 
doing IO in a really difficult way so how could someone (including MS 
flashy-marketing-department) presume a Visual Basic programmer would welcome 
Haskell with open arms? It will take that "Professional Microsoft Developer" 
community 10 years to understand C#, CLR and the whole .NET thing already :)

Plus, how can you think that the open source/free software community (us) has 
actually enough potential to support a PL research prototype immediately? Do 
you really think that such a thing could be done without a research institute 
behind it? I must tell you that you are way too optimistic about this. This 
doesn't seem to be just blind coding that we are good at.

The license is irrelevant. Microsoft Research and others are doing a fine job, 
and let's please leave them peaceful. There is the code, there is the 
research, enjoy it while you can.

-- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza
GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B  EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C