[Nix-dev] Use Haskell for Shell Scripting

[James Haigh]

On 09/02/15 19:56, Ertugrul Söylemez wrote:
> [...]
> In short:  Better stop arguing against them, regardless of what your
> reasons are. [...]
I'm not; I'm avoiding argument. Please don't make assumptions as to what
my reasons are! Otherwise your mind is arguing ‘for me’, but not
necessarily with the correct reasons and possibly in an unconstructive
way which defeats the object of me trying to avoid the topic! Actually
it's 2 unrelated topics that aren't specific to GNU OS, which I have
avoided talking about in relation to GNU OS since 2014-12-05 because I
want to be as constructive as possible for GNU OS (in other words, of
all the things with these 2 issues, GNU OS is probably my absolute
favourite), but being optimally constructive on such a complicated
matter is very time consuming, and I currently think that it's not the
best thing to focus my time on. So I'm avoiding the topic and trying to
solve (relatively) easier problems. Roll-on ARM support! Let's get NixOS
on open hardware! :-/
>>     Nevertheless, I still think that human interface choice is
>> important, and XMonad is an example of the original point that I was
>> trying to get at. It is a classic user interface, a tiling window
>> manager, using a pure-functional language. Just because something is
>> written using modern techniques doesn't mean to say that the user
>> interface itself is ‘modern’.
> I use the same combination (xmonad + taffybar) and could complain all
> day long about it.  Of course this is constructive criticism, and I'm an
> idealist to some extent, but still there is a lot of room for
> improvement.
>
> For example xmonad is too rigid.  It has a fixed data structure that
> corresponds directly to what is displayed on each screen.  Workspace
> names are strings, which is hugely inconvenient.  Something like
> tag-based volatile workspaces are not possible, although with some
> really ugly (and slow) hacks you could do it.
>
> In the ideal graphical environment I wouldn't see any reason to close or
> move a single window -- ever.  Xmonad gets closer, but is still far
> away.
What?!! That sounds very abstract and cool! Maybe esoteric. Can you
elaborate?
>> ‘multiparadigm’ is ambiguous as to what multiple paradigms that refers
>> to, but I clarified that by saying “functional/imperative”.
> I did mean that Haskell supports imperative programming just as well as
> it does support declarative programming.  Some people say that it's the
> best imperative language out there.
Yes, but the documentation, tutorials, and community emphasise the
pure-functional paradigm.
    Anyway, it doesn't stop at functional; I've been toying with the
concept of relational programming (of which functional can be seen as a
subset of). Functional is just the minimum bar for me. ;-)
    But wait, we seem to have lost the original thread! :-) So does
pure-functional scripting for pure-functional packages sound like an
appropriate placement?

Best regards,
James Haigh.