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> Despite the buzz about it, I don't see many projects for it other than shellcheck, pandoc and xmonad, and for two of those, there's better solutions around (sphinx, awesome/i3)

I tried awesome for two weeks and had one crash. I've run XMonad for 5+ years and had no crashes. Just because they are supposed to accomplish the same things does not mean that they're equal. One is better and it's because of the choice of language.

It's very hard to take your post seriously when you include something like this in it and you don't bother to qualify it even in the slightest.



> One is better and it's because of the choice of language. > It's very hard to take your post seriously when you include something like this in it and you don't bother to qualify it even in the slightest.

I looked in your history and yup, you are partial to Haskell. Why do you feel a need to immediately judge. Why did you say "hard to take seriously". Why didn't you just ask politely for more details? In my opinion, you already had your mind made up. Just like the blog poster did.

> I tried awesome for two weeks and had one crash. I've run XMonad for 5+ years and had no crashes.

That's your personal anecdote. There's no evidence that the language could have prevented the crash.

And that doesn't make the window manager "better", which is subjective. What are more people using? Awesome and i3. Primarily because they don't want to deal with Haskell when they could be doing lua or a simple config.


> I looked in your history and yup, you are partial to Haskell.

It's convenient that you have no post history to go through, since you decided that the nonsense you're posting shouldn't be tied to your real account.

Your bias is astounding, yet you go for the "your mind was already made up" card. I like Haskell but by no means am I tied to any single language and I'm not the one making posts about how all the users of a language seem to have undesirable traits.

Even better, you then criticize using "personal anecdotes", when that's exactly what you did in order to condemn the users of two languages. You half-dampen it by saying "Maybe I'm just unlucky", but the entire point of your post is "these two communities suck".

> That's your personal anecdote. There's no evidence that the language could have prevented the crash.

Any ML-family compiler will catch more crap at compile time than any C compiler. Adding lua on top will not solve any of that. None of that is opinion. It's just how the languages are designed and how they use types. Adding automatic memory management to that makes the gap even wider and in short, that stops the vast majority of crashes that you can get.

C + lua is great for lots of things, but everything is a tradeoff and here the tradeoff is that you're very likely to get crashes. Good intentions alone can't prevent segfaults and most C software is proof of that.


If it were node.js, I highly doubt I'd have a person coming out of the woodwork with cleverly placed quotes as if it's a legal threat.

Then blaming me for being biased as if you don't already have a conclusion derived. This is the behavior I experienced - to me, this feels like projection and trying to bully me into silencing what I truly witnessed. It really bothers me and makes me uncomfortable.

I'm just stating my experiences. You wanna know why I use a throwaway? Because people bully and bludgeon anyone who doesn't praise Haskell and / or Scala. And it's been unique to those language communities.

At the end of the day, your reaction is predictable. I'm not reading too deeply into what you say because, like my prior experiences, I think you have your mind up, and in spite or proof given, you're going to be on the defense / offense.

> Any ML-family compiler will catch more crap at compile time than any C compiler...

None of these things about language mattered since awesome and i3 had language as an afterthought and focused on experience. xmonad literally has haskell mentioned as a feature, the token battlestation pic (which is pretty cool) even has a haskell book next to it. Xmonad even uses haskell for the configuration of it.

Look, not trying to take a jab at hobbyists. It's just I'm saying, in my experience, I found Haskell and scala "hobbyists" to be quite mean and it hurt my feelings alot, especially when I dropped, far more politely than when they ever spoke to me, the news they're not focused on business goals and work product and just refactoring stuff over and over. They kind of failed at bringing product vision to light, even basic things like defining requirements felt beneath them. Again, maybe I've just been unlucky.


>You're proving my point. If it were node.js, I highly doubt I'd have a person coming out of the woodwork with cleverly placed quotes as if it's a legal threat.

The irony is that you came out to defend Go from any sort of criticism without any direct argument as to why Haskell is bad. Your post talks about the people who use it and criticizes them for criticizing other programmers, yet that reflects perfectly on what you are doing. And yes, I am also defending Haskell when I see your comment. I'm sure Node.js programmers would defend Node.js. Programmers care about their language choice as much as they care about their text editor/IDE choice, and it's something that we all love to argue about.

>At the end of the day, your reaction is predictable. I'm not reading too deeply into what you say because, like my prior experiences, I think you have your mind up, and in spite or proof given, you're going to be on the defense / offense.

So you haven't made up your mind already by criticizing Haskell before even evaluating it as a language? It's not making up your mind on it when you based all your judgements from personal anecdotes of Haskell and Scala programmers you've met before?

>xmonad literally has haskell mentioned as a feature

AwesomeWM lists Lua as a feature [1]. Maybe Haskell programmers care about that a bit more strongly, but both groups use their configuration language as a feature. Hyper lists JS/HTML/CSS as a feature as well [2]. Although I would argue the real argument between Haskell and other languages is safety -- just like Rust or Ada programmers would list those languages as a safety feature, Haskell programmers are inclined to do the same. It's pretty similar to saying "code has been tested extensively by our quality assurance team" or something "code has been formally verified," etc.

[1] https://awesomewm.org/ [2] https://hyper.is/


It's my experience and opinion.

Also, I looked through your history, you're a Haskell programmer. Due to the context of my thread, I'd appreciate it if you disclosed your relation so others know.

> AwesomeWM lists Lua as a feature

It's a scripting language on top of that's used for configuration.

> It's pretty similar to saying "code has been tested extensively by our quality assurance team" or something "code has been formally verified,"

The problem is Haskell developers aren't really getting enough shipped, especially relative to the advocacy I see of it. So how much does code correctness matter?

Look, let's say I want play FreeCiv. It being programmed in C vs Haskell vs Erlang doesn't mean much to me.

But imagine if FreeCiv lacked basic functionality or code documentation, and when people mentioned these things they'd get jumped by people who advocate it being programmed in an esoteric language who look down on those who program C as unsafe, inefficient, etc.

> So you haven't made up your mind already by criticizing Haskell before even evaluating it as a language? It's not making up your mind on it when you based all your judgements from personal anecdotes of Haskell and Scala programmers you've met before?

Hugo vs Pandoc

Awesome/i3 vs xmonad

You want to know why these solutions got more popular than the their Haskell predecessors? They had devops like documentation and tooling down. They picked languages that were easier to read so the community could participate. The discussion was about how to ship features by a version release, not how to force the language to get a purely internal technical working.

Users can't see the internals, so they don't care. They want something that's there for them on time and reliably. In all these years to this day, there's been more advocating Haskell philosophically on forums than there's been real discussion about getting stuff shipped. Try saying that for node/go/ruby/python.


I am not a Haskell programmer, in fact I am not very fond of the language and have only ever used it for a single project. I find the language interesting, but I disagree with many of the fundamental design decisions and it is never my first choice for a project.


On the other side, I used XMonad for a while and it crashed frequently.

I did submit a bug report and it did get fixed, but there was another crash I couldn't be bothered to try to track down, and just switched back to the standard ubuntu shell.


> I did submit a bug report and it did get fixed, but there was another crash I couldn't be bothered to try to track down, and just switched back to the standard ubuntu shell.

Interesting. What was the bug, if I may ask? Do you have a URL for it and the resolution to it?

What do you mean, you "switched back to the standard Ubuntu shell", exactly? XMonad is a window manager, it has nothing to do with shells.

On top of that, do you mean you switched back to bash, which is the standard shell of most distros, or do you really mean you switched to the standard Ubuntu terminal emulator?

There are a few things that need clarification, as what you've said doesn't make much sense in the context of window managers.


By shell, I mean window manager.

I'll try and look up the bug.




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