[arch-general] pacman new generation

[Taylor Hedberg]

Nicolas Sebrecht, Tue 2011-11-22 @ 16:24:02+0100:
> 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
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.
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