[Haskell-cafe] Type system madness

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 08:57:58PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
> Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
>> Andrew Coppin wrote:
>>
>>> Oh well, the problem is easily fixed... *sigh*
>>
>> I doubt that anybody minds having you talk about Haskell.  You've been 
>> responsible for spawning a lot of interesting threads.
>
> [And that one about compression that's still going on somewhere... lol!]
>
>> All I would suggest is that you take your cue from the other people who 
>> post to the list, and try a few tactics before you post:
>>
>> - If you have a chatty one-line comment, do 2,000 other people need to see 
>> it?
>
> Mmm. This is why I prefer NNTP. (If a thread becomes tangent, everybody 
> just marks it "ignore" and they don't have to waste time downloading it or 
> reading it.) But yeah, point taken...

>> - If you have a question to ask, try to spend 2 minutes with Google or the 
>> Haskell wiki to find the anwer.
>
> I continue to be surprised at the things that don't seem to be on the 
> Wiki... Google is typically no help at all with anything Haskell-related, 
> because Haskell is so completely obscure. The various haddoc documentation 
> is also frustratingly sparse in places. (E.g., Control.Concurrent.STM.TVar 
> contains *nothing* but terse type signatures. And concurrent programming is 
> already a tricky thing to get right.) Some things seem to be "well known" 
> yet not actually written down anywhere - e.g., the finer points of using 
> "seq" to make stuff go faster.

That's just a known haddock bug.  Had you asked instead of suffering in
silence, we would have told you that you can work around it by looking
at the GHC.Conc docs.

> But sure, I do like to try to puzzle a thing out first before posting here. 
> (If something else, I kind of enjoy a challenge...)
>
>> - Join us on #haskell on IRC.  It's extremely chatty, and you'll be 
>> welcome.
>
> Not in my experience, no.
>
> (Maybe I ask the wrong way... but almost everybody seems to simply ignore 
> me. Actually, usually when I go there absolutely nobody is speaking at all. 
> What time zone do these people live in?)

You were just unlucky.  50% of the time #haskell is silent, the other
50% it's intolerably noisy.

Stefan
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