scott wrote:
>>   Half the developers working on Haskell are Micro$oft employees.
> 
> Who's the other one working for then? ;-)

 >:-[

(This isn't my happy face.)

Actually, they work for various universities.

>> I can't begin to imagine in what universe that even makes sense - M$ 
>> is pushing F#, not Haskell. So why...? WTF...?
> 
> MS is a big company, they don't just write OSs.

No, they write flawed software of many kinds. (Or just buy it from other 
people.) Still not sure why they'd be interested in software that makes 
it easier to write *quality* software - where's the profit in that?

>>   The majority of non-trivial Haskell code doesn't work properly on 
>> Windoze. Only Linux. Or maybe Mac OS. But not Windoze.
> 
> Why is that?  Is it a problem with the Windows compiler?

The only "working" Haskell compiler runs off GNU build tools such as 
gcc, gas and ld. It also uses automake and Perl. (WTF-overload.)

Most of the things that don't work on Windoze are Haskell bindings to C 
libraries. Anything that's 100% Haskell works flawlessly on all 
platforms, but linking to C is fiddly. I'm told you need to install a 
Unix emulator such as Cygwin to make it work - which obviously I have no 
intension of doing.

>> So M$ are paying people to develop stuff that doesn't even propperly 
>> support M$'s own flagship product...? OK, I'm completely lost now!
> 
> Who knows, maybe parts of the next MS OS will be written using a 
> functional language?  I'm sure they are investigating such 
> possibilities, they can't afford not to.

Heh. I doubt it.

(Not that you care, but there *is* in fact a Haskell OS. But it's a 
research project rather than something end-users would be interested in. 
I didn't think it was even in active development any more, but 
apparently there are people still working on it...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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