[Haskell-cafe] Non-technical Haskell question

[Henning Thielemann]

On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Sven Panne wrote:

> azrael at demonlords.net wrote:
> > The original observation was that the compiler seems archaic. When
> > asked, I gave some general comments. What I should have just said was
> > that it was to much like a C compiler. Which, no matter how neat you
> > think it is, is archaic.
> 
> Hmmm, using the number of files generated from a source program as a measure
> of the "coolness" of a programming language or its compiler is extremely
> strange. There's nothing I could care less about if the language itself
> fulfills my needs. Do you care about the strange intermediate files
> VisualStudio produces? The contents of you CVS or .svn subdirectories?
> I'm quite happy being able to ignore these things...

What's unfortunate here is probably that the files are lying around in the
same directory as the sources. E.g. the build system of Modula-3 uses a
directory structure like this: 

Project
   LINUXLIBC6  - object files and other generated files for Linux
   SOLgnu      - object files and other generated files for Solaris
   src         - sources, Makefiles and other data

This way not only generated files are out of scope in every day
programming but it is also absolutely no pain to develop for several
platforms simultaneously. The disadvantage is clearly that a programmer
has to conform to this structure, but this could also be considered as
advantage. But one could consider it as an disadvantage that is more
complicated to work with many but small programs.