Maybe Monoid spilt milk

Aaron Denney wnoise at ofb.net
Thu Nov 29 14:44:44 EST 2007


On 2007-11-29, Clifford Beshers <clifford.beshers at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jeremy Shaw and I had a bunch of conversations about this kind of thing,
> almost always ending with Jeremy citing this story.  I found it at:
> http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2002/11/whats_wrong_with_rdf.html
>
><famous-anecdote>Stuart Feldman, the Bell Labs guy who invented "make", woke
>> up one morning a few weeks after he'd released it, and realized that the
>> syntax basically sucked - all those tabs and colons and weird continuation
>> rules. He started working on something better and was shot down because
>> someone said "Stuart, there are *dozens* of people using this, it's too late
>> to change it."</famous-anecdote>
>>
>
> Please publish your alternative implementation in a blog or in a package on
> Haskell.  Think of all the children that will be spared in the future.

This is also said to be why C's precedence rules for logical operators
aren't quite right.  We're still at the stage where this is fixable.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-



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