[Haskell-cafe] IDE?

[Andrew Coppin]

Creighton Hogg wrote:
> Well, since we're on the subject and it's only the Cafe list, what is 
> it that you find messy about Linux that you would want to be solved by 
> some hypothetical Haskell OS?

This is drifting off-topic again, but here goes...

There are lots of things to like about Linux. It doesn't cost money. 
It's fast. It's reliable. It's flexible. It's secure. However, 
unfortunately it's still Unix. In other words, it's a vast incoherant 
mess of largely incompatible ad-hoc solutions to individual problems 
implemented independently by unrelated hackers over the 40+ years of 
history that this software has been around. New software has to emulate 
quirks in old software, and client programs work around the emulated 
quirks in the new software to get the functionallity it actually wants. 
One vast tangled mess of complexity and disorder. Exhibit A: Package 
managers exist. Exhibit B: Autoconf exists. I rest my case.

An operating system should have a simple, clear, consistent design. Not 
unlike a certain programming language named after a dead mathematition, 
come to think of it...

(Have you ever programmed in C? You can certainly see where Unix gets 
its features from - terse, cryptic and messy.)

Still, I don't have the skill to write a functioning operating system - 
much less one that's "ready for the desktop" - so that's that I suppose...

(I did seriously investigate the task once. Indeed, I got as far as 
writing a bootloader. It worked too!)