Re: [Haskell-cafe] Playing with ATs again

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

On 5 August 2010 16:48, Gregory Crosswhite wrote:

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On 8/4/10 11:40 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote:

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Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

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Don't forget, GHC is open source: if this lack really was "dumb" and annoying you, there was nothing stopping you from rectifying this situation up until now.

Except that, in the real world, this is actually completely infeasible. Yes, I know it's the basic tenant of OSS that you can modify the program to do whatever you want. But in reality, something like GHC is far too large and complex for this to be a realistic possibility. And this holds for most other nontrivial software too.

Fair enough, but if one can't do better one's self then one should be careful about calling the work of others "dumb", which was the original point.

Exactly. Either do it yourself or be grateful that someone has done _something_, even if it isn't as good as you like. It's not like you're paying for it...

Well *I* didn't say that anything was dumb. I was merely pointing out that the much-touched "do it yourself" benefit of OSS is actually out of most people's reach. There surely can't be many people alive on Earth who actually understand type theory, and far fewer who understand it well enough to meddle with something as astonishingly complex as GHC. So really, there's little or no chance of anybody except the GHC devs fixing this. (If nothing else, the learning curve is pretty much vertical just to fix this one minor problem.) On the one hand, it's nice that we have a freely available compiler at all. (And it's one of the best pieces of Haskell software I've seen to date.) On the other hand, I've seen too many people who write open-source software answer every query and issue simply with "patches welcome". As if that's a magic bullet to solve every problem and deficiency. There needs to be a reasonable balance. (Note that in the particular case of GHC, I think us users are getting a pretty good deal. My statements are about open-source in general, not about GHC.)