[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hoogle and Network.Socket

[Achim Schneider]

John Lato <jwlato at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH
> <allbery at ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
> > On 2009 Feb 25, at 5:23, John Lato wrote:
> >>
> >> Brandon Allbery wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I have to second this; I'm a Unix sysadmin, 98% of the time if I'm
> >>> writing a program it's for Unix *and* requires POSIX APIxs, and
> >>> even if it could apply to Windows the program needed there would
> >>> be very significantly different. __And we have a Windows group for
> >>> that.
> >>
> >> 2. __As of now, the "Windows Group" seems to be mostly Duncan. __And
> >
> > Wrong Windows group: __Duncan doesn't work for us.
> >
> 
> Sorry, I misunderstood you.  I thought you meant a Windows group
> within the Haskell community, not within your company.
> 
> Honestly, what I wrote wasn't directed at you.  As I mentioned before,
> writing code as a Unix sysadmin has very different priorities than
> writing for many other problem domains.  Most of your code wouldn't
> make sense outside a Unix context, whereas bytestrings, tries, or
> graph libraries would.
> 
I don't think it makes sense to talk about missing support on any
platform: In a strict sense, how well a platform is supported is a
function of how many people care to use it. While there seems to be a
disparity between people developing programs on/for Windoze and people
working on Windoze's cross-platform capabilities wrt. Haskell, this
does not mean that you can rightfully expect people who chose not to use
your favourite platform to give a damn about it. Search for allies
amidst your pals.

I honestly doubt that iff a viable[1] way to support multiple platforms
exists any developer aware of it would choose a platform-locked in
alternative. This is the only thing you can hope for, and the only
thing you need to provide to other developers to get platform support
for free. There's a free lunch, after all, but you gotta bring your own
dishes. Or pay someone to spoon-feed you, but that's another issue.


[1] Which mostly means "negligible additional work for the developer"

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