On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 9:44 PM, Gregg Lebovitz <glebovitz@gmail.com> wrote:
Rustom,

I am drafting a document that captures some of the social norms from the comments on this list, mostly from Brandon and Wren. I have captured the discussion about module namespace and am sorting out the comments on the relationship between libraries and packages.

My initial question to the list was to try an identify where Haskell is different from other open source distributions. From what I can tell, the issues are very similar. The module name space seems to have characteristics very similar to the include file hierarchy of linux distributions.

If you have some spare cycles and would like to contribute, I think everyone would appreciate your help and effort

Gregg

Hi Gregg.

One of the common complaints one gets from a first year programming student (and its now about 3 decades I dealing with these!) is:

"The compiler/interpreter etc HAS a BUG!!!"

So...
While I am an old geezer with programming and functional programming -- doing, teaching, playing, implementing, or just plain thinking but  -- I am too much of a noob to ghc to risk falling into the "1st year student" trap above.

Yes perhaps not a typical noob...
Somethings are easier for me than the typical noob -- all the 'classical' good-stuff like pattern-matching, lambda-calculus, type-inferencing, polymorphism etc.
And this is helpful to understand the 'modern good stuff' starting monads and onwards

But then I get hit -- finding my way round hackage, installing with cabal etc -- even tho I'm an ol-time unix hacker and sysadmin-er.

So I guess its best to assume (as of now) that I dont know the ropes rather than something is wrong/broken with them.

O well... If the noob trap is one error playing it safe is probably another so here goes with me saying things that I (probably) know nothing about:
1. cabal was a beautiful system 10 years ago.  Now its being forcibly scaled up 2 (3?) orders of magnitude and is creaking at the seams
2. There's too much conflicting suggestions out there on the web for a noob
    - use system install (eg apt-get) or use cabal
    - cabal in user area or system area etc
    - the problem is exponentiated by the absence of cabal uninstall