Open Source Clean?

Nick Kallen nkallen@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Thu, 21 Jan 1999 01:16:54 -0800


> The source is available for Haskell and SML, too, and I don't think it's
> a coincidence that these are more popular languages.   Learning a
> functional programming language is a large investment of time that is
> not undertaken lightly, and many people feel reluctant to invest that
> much time in a language whose fate is in the hands of a few developers
> at perhaps a single university.    I think having open source would
> go a long way towards giving Clean a following and supporters.

Haskell predates Clean by a few years: it was the first freely available
lazy, pure language, and that's why it's popular. ML has been around since
the late 70's, (a big time advantage), and had a killer app: a theorem
prover.

I personally don't think distributing the source code will make people more
confident in programming in Clean. And I think the single university nature
of Clean is its best asset. It is what differentiates it from Haskell: it
isn't developed by committee (thank god), and is being developed by a single
team with focused interests. Don't get me wrong: the balkanization of
Haskell is a good thing: things like PolyP and Cayenne can't happen
otherwise, but Haskell is Haskell. Clean is a language whose virtue is that
there's a single standard version that works on many platforms.

Now, that's not to say that distributing the source code is a bad thing.
Personally, I'd prefer it if they do. *Especially* if they distribute the
Clean code that they use in the compiler and stuff. In general I'm more
interested in seeing an extensible compiler/parser (a la Cardelli) than
that, however.