[Haskell-cafe] Cabal failures...

[Albert Y. C. Lai]

On 12-11-20 05:37 PM, Gregory Guthrie wrote:
> No; the first sentence says that someone else had reported that testing on Windows was hard to do because of (a perceived) lack of access to Windows by Haskell developers... The implication is that Haskell developers (only/mainly) use *nix.
> I commented that if true this lack of Windows testing could limit the availability of Haskell to the largest market share of users.

Clearly, since >90% of computers have Windows, it should be trivial to 
find one to test on, if a programmer wants to. Surely every programmer 
is surrounded by Windows-using family and friends? (Perhaps to the 
programmer's dismay, too, because the perpetual "I've got a virus again, 
can you help?" is so annoying?) We are not talking about BeOS.

Therefore, if programmers do not test on Windows, it is because they do 
not want to.

And why would they want to?

Take webapp programmers for example. 99.999...% [1] of computers have 
sufficiently new web browsers. This market share is even higher than 
Windows. At the server side, the programmers have freedom in choosing 
the OS, and apparently, they choose anything but Windows, and this has 
never limited them in accessing >99.999...% of computer users.

And this, 99.999...% web browser market share, is exactly driving 
Haskell growth. Not the petty >90% Windows slice.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...