[Nix-dev] Use Haskell for Shell Scripting

[Ertugrul Söylemez]

>> In short:  Better stop arguing against them, [...]
>
> I'm not; [...]

Alright. =)


>> 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?

It's not that esoteric.  Think about the average 2013 laptop or PC with
plenty of RAM.  When you're done with a certain task, you close its
window, simply because you're used to that and perhaps because you draw
a relationship to the physical world, where you prefer your desk to be
clean and organised.

The truth is that a virtual "desktop" does not really (have to)
correspond to a real one.  There is no technical reason to close the
window other than the limits imposed by your amount of RAM and swap.  In
fact you shouldn't close windows, unless you're absolutely sure that you
will never need them again.  Most of the windows you close you just find
yourself reopening again later, going through all the procedures from
firing up a program to navigating to a file to scrolling to the part you
want to view or edit.  It's not *much* work, but it's repetetive and
unnecessary.

Think of the average Windows user, who is used to the fact that there is
only one "desktop".  When they need to suspend a task to temporarily
work on another one, they start to close or minimise windows, only to
have to find and recall all of them later.  This takes a considerable
amount of time, probably wasting a good ten minutes before you can get
back up to speed again.

Why?  Because it's the most unnatural thing you can do.  When you need
to interrupt your current work in the physical world, do you drop
everything to the floor or stuff everything back into the drawer?
Perhaps you do the first few times, but then you get a second desk or a
larger one.  That's probably the number one reason why Windows users
generally have at least two screens and would prefer to have more.

So what's the solution?  Simple: Workspaces must be cheap, dynamic and
extremely easy to manage.  There should not be a rigid mapping between
workspaces and windows.  Windows should easily be able to belong to
multiple workspaces.  A generalised xmonad could do it, but the current
one can't.

I'd be happy to discuss this further, but I'm afraid we're getting way
out of topic. =)
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