On 13/07/2013, at 11:27 PM, J. Stutterheim wrote:
- they then abandoned the Macintosh world for Windows. The Mac IDE was killed off; there is now an IDE for Windows but not MacOS or Linux.
The good news is that the latest version of Clean[2] and its code generator[3] now works fine again on 64 bit Mac OS X
Is that still the command-line tools, or has the IDE been resurrected?
- other major features remain Windows-only
The bad news is that this is true to some extend; the dynamics system is still largely Windows-only. However, this is the only language feature I can think of that really is Windows-only.
I have never been able to understand why there should be ANY OS-dependency in the dynamics feature.
- the available books about Clean are way out of date, several drafts of other books remain incomplete. - the documentation (like the Report) has always been rather amateurish and incomplete. Certainly compared with the Haskell documentation.
An iTasks book is actually in the works, which will contain a fair bit of Clean (although it is not a dedicated Clean book). There are also concrete plans to update the language manual soon-ish.
Not to be offensive, because after saying "Denk U" I have no more Dutch words I can use, but it would really pay to find a native speaker of English to give the manual a final polish.
- there is nothing to compare with the Haskell Platform.
Actually, yes there is[4].
A misundertanding. "Nothing to compare with" is idiomatic for "nothing of comparable size to". Yes, you _can_ compare the Clean Platform with the Haskell Platform; it's a lot smaller.
It can be described as a mix between Haskell Platform and a mini Hackage-like repository. There is no such thing as a Clean alternative to cabal install, though.
Keep in mind that there is only a handful of people working on Clean, while Haskell has a huge community in comparison.
Haskell has always benefited from - openness - multiple implementations - documentation