On 11/22/2011 13:36, Taylor Hedberg wrote:
I don't think, so. IMHO, the pool of contributors is bigger with a high-level language than for C, simply because the learning curve of a good high-level language is much shorter. You can't seriously be suggesting that switching to Haskell would increase the size of the pacman developer pool. I think Haskell is great too, but if you think it's bigger than C just because it's high-level, you're delusional. Even on a distro like Arch, where there seems to be a disproportionate number of Haskell users, I'd wager that
Nicolas Sebrecht, Tue 2011-11-22 @ 16:24:02+0100: there are still far more people here that know C.
The learning curve of Haskell is widely regarded as one of the steepest in programming. There are plenty of arguments to be made in its favor, but that is not one of them.
C is the lingua franca of Unix, practically everyone knows it, or at least enough of it to be moderately competent. It makes sense to keep community-developed projects like pacman in a widely-known and used language so that more people can understand the code and contribute. I don't think there's any compelling reason to rewrite pacman in another language.
Code language should not be chosen based on popularity. C is used in most unix-like software because of its quality and not as a consequence of the available developer pool for it. -- Rodrigo