Saturday 16 August 2008

Himerge (and Haskell) out to the street!

Long ago I decided to help taking Haskell a bit more outside of its own walls; I mean, it is not fair that Haskell applications and tools _only_ have to be used by Haskell programmers (this is currently the main situation) , but they should be also exposed to the outsiders, even to those with no programming experience at all!.

This point has been the main purpose of Himerge since the beginning; one of my projects that tries to throw Haskell into the world, and see how it behaves there. To get applications that you can use in a daily basis; so, daily needs can be solved and pointed out is , in my humble opinion, the only way to overcome the chicken/egg problem many new languages and paradigms have to face.

After a couple of years developing Himerge (in my spare time) , I am quite happy to see many users use it as their main graphical front-end for portage in a daily basis; and though most of the time they funnily react to the fact it is written in such a mysterious functional language; after giving it a try for a while, they realize it is not that bad, and that is actually usable! :-)

I recently wrote an article about Himerge (with some comments about Haskell) to the LinuxIdentity magazine for the special Gentoo 2008.0 edition, and which it is available in store since a couple of days ago (August 14th).

Though Himerge is quite easy and very intuitive to use, it lacks proper documentation; so this article is a first step toward collecting such a information, and at the same time, it's a way of showing to the people, that Haskell is not only fun; but it is also usable and that they need to watch it out, because it's already outside in the street :-)

Regards and Let's go for a walk!