[darcs-devel] user experience engineering note
Don Stewart
dons at galois.com
Mon Jan 14 19:50:12 UTC 2008
nicolas.pouillard:
> Excerpts from Alexander Staubo's message of Mon Jan 14 19:24:49 +0100 2008:
> > On 1/14/08, zooko <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
> > > So this is a good example of how the problems of user experience are
> > > sometimes different (and "simpler") than the problems of engineering
> > > the actual core algorithms of your program. "Responsiveness" is, I
> > > think, the most important single factor in user interaction design.
> >
> > I agree.
>
> I agree too.
>
> I'm sure that we loose many people due to darcs responsiveness.
>
> In fact, there is few darcs commands, but they are very powerful, perhaps too
> much powerful sometimes. Darcs accept to start operations that are way too
> long to complete. The user can be easily frustrated because he doesn't know
> if the command will run forever or complete the next second.
>
> I concede that using lazy functional programming makes progression more
> difficult than usual. It's in fact more challenging but we want to keep the
> core code clear and unobstructed.
It's not Haskell per se, or laziness, that's the cause of darcs lack of
responsiveness -- GHC produces highly optimised native code, certainly
much much faster than say, Python.
Slow algorithms are the issue here.
-- Don
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