[Haskell-cafe] darcs: the first haskell tool more popular than Haskell itself?

[Iavor Diatchki]

(note: these are just some random thoughts to get the day started :-))
hi,
is this really surprising?  compilers (for any language) are only of
interest to developers, while most applications written in the
language have a wide user base, so i would assume that there are many
situations where this holds (internet explorer more popular than
visual c++?).  of course, darcs itself is a tool aimed at developers,
but again, haskell developers are a subset of all the developers that
can use it.  yet another thing (and this is debian specific) is that i
use the darcs distributed with debian, which is old but works fine,
but i don't use the ghc distributed with debian because it is old, and
somewhat broken. still, it is good to know that a tool written in
haskell is doing so well, but this is not surprising either, because
after all, haskell is a pretty cool programming language.
-iavor

On 1/24/06, Isaac Jones <ijones at syntaxpolice.org> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Debian has a system called popularity-contest, which is an opt-in
> survey of package use.  I was curious to see the ranking of darcs
> among Haskell implementations themselves.  The results: Darcs ranks
> higher than ghc and hugs.
>
> #<name> is the package name;
> #<inst> is the number of people who installed this package;
> #<vote> is the number of people who use this package regularly;
> #<old> is the number of people who installed, but don't use this package
> #      regularly;
> #<recent> is the number of people who upgraded this package recently;
> #<no-files> is the number of people whose entry didn't contain enough
> #           information (atime and ctime were 0).
>
>
> #rank name                            inst  vote   old recent no-files (maintainer)
> 138   darcs                            563   159   280   124     0     (Isaac Jones)
> (51)  hugs                             304   119   157    28     0     (Isaac Jones)
> 321   ghc6                             194    81    80    33     0     (Ian Lynagh)
>
> Hugs is listed in a different category, so the ranking is off.
>
> Ian Lynagh pointed me at this nice graph showing the historical
> installation of the three packages:
>
> http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=ghc6,darcs,hugs&show_installed=on&want_percent=on&want_legend=on&beenhere=1
>
> peace,
>
>   isaac
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