[arch-general] pacman new generation

[Rodrigo Amorim Bahiense]

On 11/22/2011 13:36, Taylor Hedberg wrote:
> 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.

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