[darcs-users] GHC and Darcs

[Max Battcher]

Jason Dagit wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 6:34 AM, Patrick Waugh <ptwaugh at gmail.com 
> <mailto:ptwaugh at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Good find.
> 
>     I have to say that I have to agree.
> 
>     I had to go back to the old version in order to get darcs-client (of
>     darcs-server) to work, because I don't have time to learn Haskell.
>     I'd really rather use darcs2, because of improvements, but oh well.
> 
> 
> I saw your email about darcs-client and darcs-server, but I was rather 
> confused since darcs is just darcs.  That is, there is no separate 
> server and client components.


Patrick seems to be referring to this (perhaps poorly named) 3rd-party 
application:

http://www.equational.org/darcs-server/

Patrick: You should talk to the author of it directly, as you did with 
Darcsweb.

> I'm starting to think that it's rather unfortunate that Darcs is so 
> distinguished by its implementation language.

I'm still surprised how much anti-Functional venom is out there.  You 
read some of the rants that people make about Darcs and you see some of 
the same (false) arguments and hostility that you see if you look at 
classic anti-Lisp rants from three decades ago.

If anything, it makes it all the weirder to me how many people on the 
GHC team seem to be hasty to leave Darcs rather than lend their own 
skills to improve the speed/performance/reliability of Darcs, in 
whatever manners that they can.  It almost seems to be some sort of 
undercurrent that even some GHC developers don't think their compiler is 
efficient/speedy.  I'm sure that's not the case, but it certainly gives 
the impression from some of the text/complaints on the earlier linked 
sources.

> The most I can say is that I understand and 
> respect your point of view, and I challenge you, or anyone else that 
> wants to develop on Darcs without learning Haskell, to make your own 
> Darcs compatible program in your favorite programming language.  If the 
> claims people make about wanting to help with Darcs but only if it's 
> written in Java/C++/etc are true then you'll succeed in attractiving 
> devs and it will be a win for everyone.  And I'm sure people here would 
> be happy to answer questions that come up as you're working on such a 
> project.

Maybe on the Wiki someone should run down the list of 3rd Party tools 
and annotate it with the language the tool itself is written in?  Then 
we might have a quick resource for when someone says "I'd like to help 
Darcs but I only know/like Java" and someone could easier point out 
that, for instance, Eclipse Darcs needs Java developers...

In fact, maybe I might take a swing at doing that to the Wiki page 
myself in a day or two.

--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/