On Nov 27, 2007 1:33 PM, apfelmus
Thomas Davie wrote:
But the point is that this section of the site is the bit that's meant to be an advertisement -- we're trying to encourage people to read more,
Are we? I thought Haskell.org was intended to describe what Haskell *is*. There are plenty of articles and blog posts and wiki pages out there
David Menendez wrote: that
advocate Haskell. I don't see why the main web page needs to be polluted with marketing.
Agreed! I hate marketing! The facts can speak for themselves, if you need somebody to "explain" them, then something's wrong.
More specifically, "fact" means something that you can easily check yourself. "Robust"/"maintainable"/"testable" code are things you _can't_ easily check yourself without already learning the language.
But "shorter code" is a fact you can easily check, for instance with quicksort as example. In fact, "short code" is the reason why I picked up Haskell. Back then, I was given the task to calculate some sequence of numbers which I did in one page of C code. So far so good, but when I asked the task assigner about his solution, he responded: "Ah, this problem, that's 1 line in Haskell. Well, 2 lines if the terminal is too small." Such power! Hearing just this was more than enough reason for me to learn Haskell and to never look back.
Regards, apfelmus
This is not a reasonable definition of "fact". There are many facts which are not practical for a person to verify quickly, and many of them are quite important. It is perfectly reasonable to seek a consensus of experts on a subject, and it is perfectly reasonable to present information such as claims of robustness / maintainability / testability on the assumption that the person reading it will then take steps to verify the claims, generally by asking trusted experts.