[Gnu-arch-users] Re: darcs vs tla

[Mark Stosberg]

On 2004-11-08, Catalin Marinas <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> A second problem I think is Haskell. Not so many people can help with
> coding and it is also much slower than C or C++.

Other people have already addressed the "slower than C" issue. I'll
address the "not so many people can help..." issue.

Recall that Arch became popular with despite being written in shell. :)

Users don't care so much about the implementation language. They care
about the features and documentation, because that's what they see. If
darcs became sufficiently popular because it functions well, it's
possible that like darcs, someone would re-implement it in another
language.

I'm a Perl programmer who contributes to darcs, and I don't see that
Haskell is a big issue holding back contributions.  What I see instead
is how much work in a successful project is /not/ coding. As a
non-Haskell programmer, I can:

 - Help with the direction of the software through bug reports and
   feature suggestions.
 - Contribute documentation patches
 - Contribute test cases, written in shell or Perl.
 - Help answer questions on the -users list
 - Work on the website, other forms of advocacy. 
 - Work on the CVS and Arch conversion tools, or the repo browser, which
   are all written in Perl.

I was reading today how on large software projects, coding can be 15% of
the effort:

http://www.ifpug.com/Articles/estimating.htm

I think with open source projects, a similar effect happens: The 
more the project grows, the more different kinds of contributions are needed
to make it work. For example, you might add translators, or people to
port the application to other platforms.  

BTW, Darcs 1.0 was released today!

I should mention after a stint of being an arch user for a bit, I have
converted all my arch managed projects over to darcs. I'm a convert. 

        Mark


-- 
http://mark.stosberg.com/