On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 12:02, Nicolas Sebrecht <nsebrecht@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > The 22/11/11, Karol Blazewicz wrote: >> On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Nicolas Sebrecht <nsebrecht@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> > OP raised one or two benefits of Haskell over shell scripting. He is >> > right even if it's somewhat partial: many of high-level languages have >> > very good advantages over shell scripting. I do think pacman could be >> > much better if rewritten in one of these languages. >> >> Isn't pacman written in C? > > Yep, sorry. > > s/shell scripting/low-level progrmming languages like C/g > > :-) I am somewhat allergic to the kind of statements you make. It sounds like you are alluding to Haskell (and other hi-level languages, whatever _that_ means) as some sort of magic pixie dust that can be taken out in order to spray good-ness on a software project. There are dozens of other things to consider. In this particular case these are the most pertinent IMNSHO: - Many of these languages improve the ability to reason about the behaviour of the program. This _can_ improve quality. HOWEVER, pacman doesn't strike as a tool that suffers from bad quality, there seems to be a development team that fully understand the crucial role that pacman plays in Arch and they behave accordingly in relation to rolling out updates. - Many of these languages allow for quicker development; by raising the abstraction level it's possible to express more complex ideas in fewer lines of code and given that the lines/hour written by a developer is fairly static across languages it leads to quicker development. HOWEVER, pacman doesn't suffer from slow development, there are new releases with new features fairly frequently (probably as frequently as the community can stand them). - Finally with each language comes a pool of possible contributors, the group of people who already know, or are willing to learn the language. For C this pool is huge, for most of these hi-level languages not so. So my conclusion is that when you say "I do think pacman could much better if rewritten in one of these languages", then I say that you most likely are completely wrong. The more likely effect of rewriting pacman in one of these languages is that the current development team would disperse, there wouldn't be as large a pool of programmers to recruit from to replace them, and in the end pacman would turn out to be worse. /M -- Magnus Therning OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 email: magnus@xxxxxxxxxxxx jabber: magnus@xxxxxxxxxxxx twitter: magthe http://therning.org/magnus
