Interview: David Roundy of Darcs Revision Control

comforteagle writes "In the aftermath of our last interview with Tom Lord, regardless of personalities, it became apparent that the idea of decentralizing CVS is a big deal. Many mentioned darcs as an alternative to Arch. Mark Stosberg has interviewed project head-hancho David Roundy about darcs, his 'theory of patches,' what's next, and on using Haskell for the project."

Comments

Re:Haskell just won't cut it

[MikeBabcock]

I was about to post more or less the same thing you did -- that users shouldn't care what its written in but I realized as I read your post that it isn't in fact true.

How would you feel if Microsoft released the source code to MS Excel in, say, Brainf*ck?

Actually, lets say its an obscure compiled language that can't be easily translated into another language at all.

Would you be praising MS for their contribution to the community or decrying their choice of language which limits the legibility and review of the code?

Haskell is completely opaque to me (as far as debugging is concerned) although I'm sure I could learn it if I wanted to (having tucked many others under my belt already, including most recently PostScript for some reason). That opacity does change my feelings about using a program -- RMS' views and paranoias notwithstanding, his thoughts about "what if the developper dies or quits maintaining the code?" are justified.

I have expectations that people would continue to maintain a Haskell program because I've met Haskell programmers -- but not as assured as I'd be if it were written in C, PERL or even Python. (I leave Java off that list since most Java programmers seem intent on code-hiding rather than sharing).