[Haskell-cafe] Poor first impression

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 12:11:30PM -0300, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> On 4/27/07, Joe Re <jre2 at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> > Perhaps you were installing by tarball because you thought Fedora
> > doesn't have a recent version of ghc in their repositories?
> 
> 
> Exactly. I saw the latest version was very recent, didn't think any FC6
> repos woudl have it.
> As a matter of fact I wasn't even aware that FC6 repos had ANY haskell
> compiler in there.

Note that the Haskell standard hasn't been updated in almost ten
years.  The differences between GHC 6.6.1 and 6.2.2 (or whatever FC6
has) are relatively minor and almost only affect programs that are
unportable to begin with. 

> > Minor side note: ghc is just one of many (albeit the dominant)
> > compiler for Haskell.  Surely you wouldn't discredit C++ as a language
> > just because your borland compiler broke? :-)
> 
> Don't worry, I wasn't  as mad as I sounded. But I'm latin so I wanted to do
> a big scene so everyone pays attention and fixes this, either in the
> documentation, in the web page (by making the notice coloured red and
> <blink>blinking</blink> (joke), or in the ./configure script, or somewhere
> else.

> Thanks to everyone for their replies and respect. I could as well have
> earned a flame or two, but you were all very cool and polite, which speaks
> volumes about the quality of the community you guys have here.

It has been said many times and I will say it again - in the long run,
the only good thing haskell has is a community of nice people.
Everything else is cloned quickly. 

Stefan