[Haskell-cafe] HaskellWiki and Wikipedia

Ketil Malde ketil at malde.org
Mon Jun 21 14:57:04 EDT 2010


Roman Beslik <beroal at ukr.net> writes:

>>> I do not agree. They are not confused by other languages, they treat
>>> all languages as born equal.

>> Are you saying this is a good thing?

> Yes. There is more than Haskell.

Sure.  But when I am programming in Haskell, I am generally most
interested in using terms in that context.  It is an unfortunate fact
that a lot of terms in computer science is used with wildly different
meanings in the different communities.

> "Generic programming" is a bad term so I do not care if it is used in
> the Haskell sense or in the Wikipedia sense. It should not be used at
> all.

This is arguably correct, but unfortunately it /is/ being used, and it
needs to be defined.

>> The article on type systems [..]

> Do we read different Wikipedia-s? Wikipedia article "Type system"
> discussed all kinds of type system, including dependent, linear,
> intersection. Yes, dynamic typing is a type system. 

Not in the sense of the definition in the first paragraph of the
article ('a tractable syntactic framework').  If you find the article
clean and informative, good for you. In /my/ opinion it's a mess, and
every other sentence is misleading or just flat out wrong.

This is a defect that arises from the way WP is written - you can add
just about anything if you can cite a "reliable source" claiming it.
Which works out well for the most part, but ends up in chaos when
various sources use the same term for quite different things.

> Sorry, dear, I forgot you did not like it.

Why don't we just agree to disagree without being patronizing and
condescending about it?  And I /like/ dynamic typing, after all, that's
what algebraic data types give you, is it not?

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants


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