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

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Andrew Coppin wrote:

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

And those developers do not care whether Haskell libraries compile
on windows or not.

> 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.

Windows is popular amongst general computer users, but less popular
amongst developers and less popular still amongst Haskell developers.

> > 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,

This is a very small proportion of all windows applications and many/
most of them run via Wine, a code base of 1.8 million lines with a
worth according to Ohloh of $29Mil (which I consider very conservative):

    http://www.ohloh.net/p/wine

> and other 
> programs which are designed for Unix but (sometimes) also run on Windows.

A far larger proportion of Unix program run on windows, due to two
factors:

  - Unix people write command line apps and libraries which are always
    easier to port to windows.
  - Unix people doing things like windows backends to GTK+ and QT to make
    GUI applications portable to windows.

> I'm just saying, we could still do better...

My point is that its up to people who care about windows to fix things
for windows.

I am a user of Debian and Ubuntu. About a year ago I became sick and
tired of the poor state of haskell in Debian. I didn't complain, I
joined the debian-haskell-maintainers group and started packaging
haskell stuff for Debian. Now, the situation has improved vastly.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/