[PRL] Fwd: Linspire/Freespire Core OS Team and Haskell

[Dave Herman]

This made me think of this:

     http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Dave

Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> The most interesting part is that they are moving from OCAML to Haskell. 
> So much for the advanced module system and its central role in software 
> development. It would be interesting to find out why they are porting 
> the code.
> 
> -- Matthias
> 
> On May 15, 2006, at 1:52 PM, Paul A. Steckler wrote:
> 
>> Functional programming in the Real World, sort of.
>>
>> -- Paul
>>
>> ---
>> The OS team at Linspire, Inc. would like to announce that we are
>> standardizing on Haskell as our preferred language for core OS
>> development.
>>
>> We are redoing a bunch of our infrastructure using Haskell as our
>> common
>> standard language. Our first task is redoing our Debian package builder
>> (aka autobuilder) in Haskell.  Other tools such as ISO builders,
>> package
>> dependency checkers are in progress. The goal is to make a really tight
>> simple set of tools that will let developers contribute to Freespire,
>> based on Debian tools whenever possible. Our hardware detector,
>> currently in OCaml, is on the block to be rewritten as well.
>>
>> There are four of us using Haskell, all CCed on this message.  All of
>> us
>> have been using functional languages for quite some time.  At Linspire,
>> our choices have been OCaml and Haskell. David Fox wrote the hardware
>> detector in OCaml and is now porting it to Haskell.  Jeremy Shaw has
>> been doing various utilities in Haskell for several years.  Sean
>> Meiners
>> recently wrote an application for managing his recipe collection and is
>> now hooked.  I am porting our CD build procedure from OCaml to Haskell.
>>
>> We are interested in many other uses of Haskell.  The recent discussion
>> about Haskell as a shell interests greatly, for example, as we have all
>> suffered through years of bash code.  We'd also like to make some
>> Haskell bindings for Qt and KDE, though at the moment we don't have a
>> good plan to tackle that problem efficiently.
>>
>> To date, Linspire (formerly Lindows) has focused on polishing Linux for
>> the consumer market.  I mentioned Freespire, above.  We announced
>> Freespire recently (www.freespire.org).  Essentially it is a more open,
>> developer friendly version of Linspire.
>> http://freespire.org/about/vision and http://freespire.org/support/faqs
>> have good overviews.  Access through apt, open-source CNR client and
>> many other good things.
>>
>> I mention Freespire because some of our colleagues were concerned that
>> using Haskell would isolate us from the larger community of developers
>> and make it hard to find new employees skilled in Haskell, should we
>> need to.  From our perspective, functional programming makes us more
>> effective and we think that getting even a few people who know Haskell
>> hacking with us is a better combination than lots of Perl and bash.
>> I'm
>> not sure I expect anyone on this list to disagree, but still I'd love
>> to
>> hear your thoughts on the subject.
>>
>> Also, Linspire is based on Debian. We've talked a little with John
>> Goerzen who announced his missingH library here a while back.  We've
>> imported it and expect to pass updates back to him as well as any other
>> libraries and tools that he would be interested in includng in the
>> Debian archive.  Also, it seems there are quite a few other libraries
>> out there which are either not debianized or stale, but perhaps that is
>> because I haven't fully caught up with what people on this list have
>> done.  If there isn't a cron job running somewhere that updates an
>> archive with Cabalized libraries and apps, we would like to help set one
>> up.
>>
>> I will be at Debconf from Sunday, May 14 through Tuesday evening.  If
>> anyone on this list is there, I would love to chat and see how we can
>> help each other.
>>
>>
>> Clifford Beshers <clifford.beshers at linspire.com>
>> OS Team Lead
>> Linspire, Inc.
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> PRL mailing list
>> PRL at lists.ccs.neu.edu
>> https://lists.ccs.neu.edu/bin/listinfo/prl
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> PRL mailing list
> PRL at lists.ccs.neu.edu
> https://lists.ccs.neu.edu/bin/listinfo/prl