From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2007-01-03T08:32:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Status of Cardinal (was Re: Proposal to create a new mailing list)

On 1/2/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
> Martin DeMello wrote:
> >
> > On the other hand, a lot of people have flocked to Haskell simply to
> > hack on Pugs. I'm sure if a really good alt-lang-based ruby vm was
> > developed, people would learn said lang just to hack on it.
>
> Can you quantify "a lot of people have flocked to Haskell simply to hack
> on Pugs"? How does that number compare with the number of people hacking
> on Parrot? How do these numbers stack up relative to the size of the
> Perl 5.8.x communities? I actually wandered to the Pugs and Parrot sites
> last night just to see what they were up to. They're both in Gentoo's
> Portage tree -- I could play with them if I wanted to, but I don't.

No numbers, but I have been keeping a vague eye on perl6 and pugs, and
the impression I get is that Haskell has proved to be far more of an
asset (it's a very productive language indeed) than a dealbreaker.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/10/ofun.html is indicative.

> I think I have the GHC binary installed because it's required by Darcs
> and there are a couple of projects I hack on occasionally that are using
> Darcs. I think Haskell and Darcs and GHC and Pugs are all dead-ends and
> won't survive a "market shakeout", no matter how high their "quality" is
> on any metric. Haskell, GHC, Darcs and Pugs are deal-breakers for me.

I can't argue with that, but I hope it's wrong. There really is a lot
to be gained from powerful, expressive languages, which C is
emphatically not.

martin