[Haskell-cafe] What's the deal with Clean?

[Andrew Coppin]

Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> Andrew Coppin wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm dissapointed that Haskell doesn't have *more* of a Windows bias. It 
>> _is_ the platform used by 90% of the desktop computers, after all. (As 
>> unfortunate as that undeniably is...)
>>     
>
> That is not true in my home and its not true where I work.
>
> In addition, saying "90% of all desktop computers" is misleading;
> instead we should be talking about the computers of software developers
> and there, the figure is almost certainly well below 90%.
>   

Depends what you develop. I know of plenty of developers who use MS 
Visual Studio for everything, for example.

You can pretend that Windows isn't popular and thus there's no need to 
support it, but to me that seems like a fairly unrealistic point of view.

> The problem here is that window is the odd one out.
>   

This, it seems, is why there are programs in this world that are 
designed for Windows but (sometimes) also run on Unix, and other 
programs which are designed for Unix but (sometimes) also run on Windows.

I would like to add that GHC itself is really rather well-behaved under 
Windows. Many Unix programs simply get recompiled under Cygwin or 
something, resulting in a program that *runs* on Windows, but doesn't 
follow any Windows-related conventions and so forth. GHC actually 
behaves very well under Windows. And we have some quite nice library 
support for writing Haskell programs which compile unmodified under 
Windows and Linux. (E.g., filepath, ansi-terminal, etc.) I'm just 
saying, we could still do better...