When i first heard about distributed revision control system about 2
years ago, i heard of Darcs, which is written in Haskell. I was hugely
excited, thinking about the functional programing i love, and the no-
side effect pure system i idolize, and the technology of human animal
i rapture in daily.

I have no serious actual need to use a revision system (RVS) in recent
years, so i never really tried Darcs (nor using any RVS). I just
thought the new-fangled distributed tech in combination of Haskell was
great.

About few months ago, i was updating a 6-year old page i wrote on unix
tools: ( http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/usoft.html ) and i was
trying to update myself on the current state of art of revision
systems. I read Wikipedia this passage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcs

In article <1192850894.310464.89070@e9g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,
Xah Lee xahlee.org> wrote:

There is more to 'RVS' (as you call it) than just the implementation
language.

On 20 Ott, 05:28, Xah Lee xahlee.org> wrote:

yes-and-no.

Programming and use cases are not maths. Many mathematics are
the worst programmers i've seen because they want to solve things and
much more often you just need heuristics. Once they are into exact
world they loose there capability to see the factor of relevance in
algorithms.

And they almost never match the mental model that the average
user has about a problem.

On Oct 20, 2:04 pm, llothar wrote:

I read somewhere that for large primes, using Fermat's Little Theorem
test is *good enough* for engineers because the chances of it being
wrong are less likely than a cosmic particle hitting your CPU at the
exact instant to cause a failure of the same sort. This is the
primary difference between engineers and mathematicians.

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 01:20:47 -0000, Daniel Pitts
coloraura.com> wrote:

George Neuner wrote:

Mechanician (to the researcher): Hey, you look pretty good. What's your sign?

On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 14:04:06 -0700, llothar tried to confuse
everyone with this message:

I'm, not sure that I'm getting your point, but are you trying to argue that
_not_ knowing mathemathics makes you a better programmer? Or maybe that learning
math is useless to a programmer? This must be the most ignorant post I've seen
this week. The *best* programmers I've seen actually had mathematic education.
The programmers who don't know math are the ones who end up on DailyWTF.

No but it doesn't help you very much either. They are just different
skills.

No and at least the mathematical idea of building a universe on a
basic set
of axioms is pretty exciting for a programmer. But it's the idea not
the real
wisdom (I never had to use any serious maths in my 25 years of
programming)
that you need as a programmer

llothar wrote:

Umm, the term is "literate" programmer and there is evidence that it is not a
"failure".

Based on what do you call it "dead end". It's used, it's outlasted many other
flashes in the pan, it does what its users require. You will need evidence
for such a claim.

"base a theory" on what? There's a clause missing here.

Is that a technical evaluation? It looks like random inflammatory comments
without basis in logic or evidence. Can stupidity be absolute? What is the
metric of stupidity?