[Haskell-cafe] Why not Darcs?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2011, Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:

> David Terei wrote:
>> Good chance you've already read this but if not here is a good post by
>>  Linus about his take on the problems with darcs:
>> 
>> http://markmail.org/message/vk3gf7ap5auxcxnb
>
> I always have to smile at the complaint that something is "academic". :D
>
> You know, like purely functional programming, that's soo academic. It's 
> centered around some academic ideas, like mathematical functions, higher-rank 
> types, monads and zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms, that have absolutely no 
> relevance in real life, and that just don't work in practice. You do *not* 
> want to write whole programs that way. At some
> point, you need something that works at another level than pure functions. 
> What the *hell* do you do?

I also found the introduction about 'darcs' being too academic quite 
silly. However at the end of his invited rant Linus proposes a requirement 
(or may we call it 'axiom'?), that would be nice to be have: An identifier 
(a 'version') that can be uniquely mapped to a set of files and their 
contents. In Darcs this is the darcs history and it is usually the largest 
part of submitted darcs patches.