Re: [tlug] Darcs and the Lack of Haskell Programmers

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:
 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

 >> Surely you don't expect me to be surprised!  But ... what do you think
 >> the odds are that they *could* switch to a pure-Ruby library for Darcs,
 >> Mercurial, or Bazaar?

 > Darcs would be interesting; certain parts of it look complex enough that
 > I probably wouldn't trust a Ruby rewrite of them.

Before the "power-of-language" thread infects us here, let me point
out that my claim is that git was designed from the git-go (as you
were, men, as you were) to be driven by scripts, and thus presented a
sane target for a shell driver.  When going to the next level down, it
presented a straightforward API for the object DB, so Ruby code could
easily be written for it.  Darcs and Bazaar are definitely not
factored the same way, and I bet not Mercurial either.

Of course all the languages in question are Turing-complete and able
to call all the needed OS facilities; in that sense a rewrite *can* be
done.  But would you *want* to?  Consider that in the last month alone
I've seen mention of at least *six* named formats for bzr repos, each
of which has a specific API.  And Darcs is something the cat coughed
up as far as I can tell; I can see no designed API at all.  (Darcs 2
may be better, but from comments on the Darcs lists I suspect not.)