[Haskell-cafe] Re: Is 78 characters still a good option? Was: breaking too long lines

[Gwern Branwen]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 8:29 PM, Achim Schneider <barsoap at web.de> wrote:
> Maurí­cio <briqueabraque at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Maybe we could learn with them: what about if Haskell Weekly
>> News had a section on code review, like many newspapers have
>> book review sections?
>>
> The weekly WTF?

I'm not sure such a thing is good... At the very least, such reviews
should be anonymous, especially if we're going to cover bad code
instead of good. Here's my contribution:

I was cabalizing a package once, and I chucked into the build-depends
'ghc' and made it build. About 30 seconds later, it occurred to me
that this was a geometry library and what the heck was it doing with
the GHC API? So I go looking, and I find a module of utility
functions. It's importing GHC.Base.
I remove the import and scroll down to see the error.

It turns out that 20 megabytes of GHC code was being linked into this
program for one function.
I took the quick way out and typed into the module: 'isJust Nothing =
False; isJust (Just a) = True'.

-- 
gwern