[Haskell-cafe] Re: New slogan for haskell.org

[David Fox]

On Nov 27, 2007 1:33 PM, apfelmus <apfelmus at quantentunnel.de> wrote:

> David Menendez wrote:
> > Thomas Davie wrote:
> >
> >> But the point is that this section of the site is the bit that's meant
> >> to be an advertisement -- we're trying to encourage people to read
> >> more,
> >
> >
> > Are we? I thought Haskell.org was intended to describe what Haskell
> *is*.
> > There are plenty of articles and blog posts and wiki pages out there
> that
> > advocate Haskell. I don't see why the main web page needs to be polluted
> > with marketing.
>
> Agreed! I hate marketing! The facts can speak for themselves, if you
> need somebody to "explain" them, then something's wrong.
>
> More specifically, "fact" means something that you can easily check
> yourself. "Robust"/"maintainable"/"testable" code are things you _can't_
> easily check yourself without already learning the language.
>
> But "shorter code" is a fact you can easily check, for instance with
> quicksort as example. In fact, "short code" is the reason why I picked
> up Haskell. Back then, I was given the task to calculate some sequence
> of numbers which I did in one page of C code. So far so good, but when I
> asked the task assigner about his solution, he responded: "Ah, this
> problem, that's 1 line in Haskell. Well, 2 lines if the terminal is too
> small." Such power! Hearing just this was more than enough reason for me
> to learn Haskell and to never look back.
>
>
> Regards,
> apfelmus
>
>
This is not a reasonable definition of "fact".  There are many facts which
are not practical for a person to verify quickly, and many of them are quite
important.  It is perfectly reasonable to seek a consensus of experts on a
subject, and it is perfectly reasonable to present information such as
claims of robustness / maintainability / testability on the assumption that
the person reading it will then take steps to verify the claims, generally
by asking trusted experts.
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