In summary, Jon's blocg says the haskell compiler is GHC is dropping
the haskell-based darc as its source control system.
good news to know.
See also:
Distributed RCS, Darcs, and Math Sacrilege
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/darcs.html
plain text version below.
-------------------------
Distributed RCS, Darcs, and Math Sacrilege
Xah Lee, 2007-10-19
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 control system (RCS)
in recent years, so i never really tried Darcs (nor actively using any
RCS). I just thought the new-fangled distributed tech in combination
of Haskell was great.
About 2 months ago, i was updating a 5-year old page i wrote on unix
tools (The Unix Pestilence: Tools and Software) and i was trying to
update myself on the current state of the art of revision systems. I
read Wikipedia (Darcs↗) this passage:
Darcs currently has a number of significant bugs (see e.g. [1]).
The most severe of them is "the Conflict bug" - an exponential blowup
in time needed to perform conflict resolution during merges, reaching
into the hours and days for "large" repositories. A redesign of the
repository format and wide-ranging changes in the codebase are planned
in order to fix this bug, and work on this is planned to start in
Spring 2007 [2].
This somewhat bursted my bubble, as there always was some doubt in the
back of my mind about just how Darcs is not just a fantasy-ware
trumpeted by a bunch of functional tech geekers. (i heard of Darcs in
irc emacs channel, who are often student and hobbyists programers)
Also, in my light research, it was to my surprise, that Darcs is not
the only distributed system, and perhaps not the first one neither,
contrary to my impressions. In fact, today there are quite a LOT
distributed revision systems, actually as a norm. When one looks into
these, such as Git↗, one finds that some of them are already used in
the industry for large projects, as opposed to Darcs's academic/
hobbist kind of community.
In addition to these findings, one exacerbation that greatly pissed me
off entirely about Darcs, is the intro of the author (David Roundy)'s
essay about his (questionable-sounding) “theory of patches” used in
Darcs. (
http://darcs.net/manual/node8.html#Patch )
Here's a quote:
I think a little background on the author is in order. I am a
physicist, and think like a physicist. The proofs and theorems given
here are what I would call ``physicist'' proofs and theorems, which is
to say that while the proofs may not be rigorous, they are practical,
and the theorems are intended to give physical insight. It would be
great to have a mathematician work on this, but I am not a
mathematician, and don't care for math.
From the beginning of this theory, which originated as the result
of a series of email discussions with Tom Lord, I have looked at
patches as being analogous to the operators of quantum mechanics. I
include in this appendix footnotes explaining the theory of patches in
terms of the theory of quantum mechanics. I know that for most people
this won't help at all, but many of my friends (and as I write this
all three of darcs' users) are physicists, and this will be helpful to
them. To non-physicists, perhaps it will provide some insight into how
at least this physicist thinks.
I love math. I respect Math. I'm nothing but a menial servant to
Mathematics. Who the fuck is this David guy, who proclaims that he's
no mathematician, then proceed to tell us he doesn't fucking care
about math? Then, he went on about HIS personal fucking zeal for
physics, in particular injecting the highly quacky “quantum mechanics”
with impunity.
-------------------------
Btw, Jon, you often attack Lisp, Haskell. However, i don't think i've
ever seen you criticize OCaml.
Of course, since you sell OCaml thus you are probably very biased.
Is there some criticism of OCaml you could say? so at least to show
you are not that biased?
If you do reply to give some criticism of OCaml, please don't just
give some cursory lip service that appears to be negative criticism
but not. It might be true that you really think OCaml is
comparatively great in all or almost all aspects... but surely there
are some critically negative aspects?
Xah
∑
http://xahlee.org/
☄
