Hacker News Reader

Comment by phillmv | Hacker News Reader

I know it's possible, but goddamnit I didn't want to learn Haskell in the first place! That is my bone of contention.

Yes, yes, it might make me a better person but I want to try XMonad more than I want to fuck around with Haskell.

Personally I believe that optimizing for the technical user is much more important than user-friendliness in developer tools, especially window managers and text editors. Most people don't have the desire or the motivation to write full-featured developer tool extensions, but those who do should have the full power of a language like Haskell at their fingertips.

I think the fact that no one has bothered to write a limited configuration format is telling. It seems to indicate that people who have learned Haskell don't see any benefit in it and appreciate the flexibility offered to them.

  > I think the fact that no one has bothered to write a
  > limited configuration format is telling.

Specious reasoning. There are a lot of people that just know enough Haskell to fiddle with their XMonad config and/or copy-paste bits from other people's XMonad configs.

I'd say the ratio of XMonad users who would build a easy-config system to total XMonad users is small. You're trying to claim that total XMonad users = X, and since X people are using it without creating the 'new system,' it means that no one sees the utility in it.

No, I'm saying that of all the XMonad users who know Haskell, none has bothered to write an alternative configuration system. That is, once you know Haskell you seem to no longer find interest in such a system.

Try awesome[1]. It uses Lua, which is probably a more familiar language(I never learned Lua, but am still able to make minor changes to the config file, something I wouldn't try with Haskell). That, combined with a few other things, is what made me move from xmonad to awesome.

[1] http://awesome.naquadah.org

If it's just the choice of language that's the issue, try wmii. The default config is written in Bourne shell, but all of the actual interaction between the config and the wm is done through a plan9-style api, so you can configure it in any language you want. The Ubuntu package comes with sample configs written in Python and Ruby in addition to Bourne shell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com