[Haskell-cafe] Re: A suggestion for the next high profile Haskell project

Neil Mitchell ndmitchell at gmail.com
Tue Dec 19 13:19:25 EST 2006


Hi

> Obviously when
>
>  Cost(Upgrade) > Cost(Optimisation)
>
> for the customer. Those costs are
>
>  Cost(Upgrade)      = Price of more memory or new PC which is fast enough.
>
>  Cost(Optimisation) = Hours_spent * Fee_per_Hour / N

You are talking closed source commercial software for the masses. I
don't know anyone who distributes software like this written in
Haskell (although I'm sure there might be one or two)

Now imagine working for a single company, or for small volume
software. You ask them to upgrade, they turn around and say "bye bye".

Now imagine you are working for a company, and have to convince people
to throw away C and move to Haskell. Haskell is too slow will often be
an initial argument, if its in any way right, that will be enough.

Now imagine you are writing an open source project. People will turn
around and use a Haskell compiler written in C (Hugs) instead of one
written in Haskell (GHC) because its 100 times faster to load the
program. Imagine you are writing a version control client, people will
complain because certain operations take 100's of years on their big
Haskell repo. [I use Hugs, and complain that darcs on the Yhc repo
sometimes goes into virtual non-termination - although I love both GHC
and darcs at the same time]

Speed is sometimes important. Let's not forget that and wheel out cost
of hardware arguments.

Thanks

Neil


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