On Nov 27, 2007 1:33 PM, apfelmus <apfelmus@quantentunnel.de> wrote:
David Menendez wrote:
> 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 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.