Re: [Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] GHC is a monopoly compiler

Its enemies did a very thorough hatchet job.

Not thorough enough I say, as a sworn enemy. I actually have haskell platform installed with batteries included at work on windows (because that's how we set up python - I pleaded but got nowhere). I even have a current bug falling somewhere between the platform and stack - something crashed looking for the standard linux command line tools - was it the msys2 or mingw in platform, or was it stack? Where do I even turn for help? I'm not part of the 'they' straw-man you sketch out, and I'm asserting that the reality in the community is the opposite - commercial Haskell is the runt of the litter and shame on the community for not acknowledging this. At the very least, bashing commercial Haskell interests for being commercial is a weak argument, given the reality of how little commercial scope exists right now. Accusations of engagement in monopolistic intent is, quite frankly, pure projection. On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 1:21 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 11:11 PM, Michael Sloan wrote:

...

LOL! Oh man, this guy must be pulling my leg... Haskell platform was never a batteries included plan. It was a plan for package bureaucracy, mixed in with a broken installation approach. Sorry, but that was not a good enough attempt at emulating python's "batteries included" . From https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0206/

Wrong.

Its enemies did a very thorough hatchet job. But they did let on their real intent: "batteries included" meant they can't force people to install their new incompatible batteries whenever they decide. "Batteries included" was exactly what they did NOT want, and do not want, because it limits them; unless, of course, they are the only source of the batteries.

So now we have a battery store run by a company, which also ships its own build tool that works primarily with that store, and requires you to specify which generation of batteries to use --- and still runs into conflicts when someone wants to mix different versions of things because they're building the tool with the parts they need instead of the ones authorized by the store.

Granted, a largeish chunk of the problem is that putting anything into the "batteries included" package space (ghc global packages) makes using any other versions of those packages scary at best. This is still a problem for the packages that ghc itself uses, and are therefore difficult to upgrade without replacing ghc.

-- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allbery.b@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net

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