[Haskell-cafe] the beginning of the end

[Andrew Coppin]

On 05/12/2010 05:34 PM, Daniel Peebles wrote:
> Oh yeah, the 2.0 stuff that snobby techies love to hate :) hrrmpf back 
> in my day we programmed in binary using a magnetized needle on the 
> exposed tape! I don't need any of this newfangled bull****.

I'm still just miffed that people are trying to use HTTP to serve 
interactive desktop applications. Talk about abusing a technology to try 
to make it do things it's simply not designed for and not appropriate 
for... But hey, it's popular now, so we're stuck with it forever. *sigh*

> I kid! But I am curious to see why people are so opposed to this 
> stuff? The attitude "I can't see any reason for it to exist" (without 
> having seriously tried it) seems similar to that our (haskell's) 
> detractors use when taking a cursory glance at it and saying the 
> syntax doesn't make sense.
>

A while back Don (I think) sent out an email saying "hey people, follow 
X, Y and Z" - most of which I never go anywhere near. When I look at 
things like Reddit, Twitter, Stack Overflow, Planet Haskell and so on, I 
guess I just don't "get it".

I get Haskell. It's a programming language. You write programs with it. 
I get VB - even if I think it sucks. But something like Stack Overflow, 
I find myself just staring at it thinking "what the hell /is/ this thing?"

I sound as if I'm old or something.

About the only one I've been able to figure out is Twitter. As best as I 
can tell, it lets you post a textual status line. THAT'S IT. That's ALL 
it does. Rather like what MSN Messenger let you do 10 years ago... 
except without the bit where it also does useful stuff as well. Like 
what Facebook lets you do today, but without all the other useful 
features. Worse, as far as I can tell, half of the things posted are 
replies to other things, and there is /no way/ to figure out what 
they're replies to. Oh, you can tell /who/ they're replies to, just not 
which specific post they relate to. I spent about an hour trying to 
figure out how to do this, because I just refuse to believe that sound a 
trivial feature could be missing, but no... you actually cannot do 
something as trivial as follow a conversation. You can only read one 
half of it and try to guess where the various bits of the other half 
are. What the hell?

...OK, I am now officially old.