Lambda the Ultimate

LtU is primarily a weblog dedicated to posting links to interesting projects, research papers, and programming languages related news, by contributing editors who can post to the home page - items intended to be discussed in the comments section.

Editors (as opposed to guest bloggers who are asked to join us because of their contributions to the field) are encouraged not to post about their own work, nor to post rants and opinions to the home page.

This allowed LtU to maintain a very high standard of quality for the news items posted to the home page, and resulted in deep and informed discussions.

As LtU grew, the attached forum became more and more active. This level of activity, while exhilarating, poses some predictable problems. Too many of the problems that plague other forums related to programming languages, such as religious wars about typing, Microsoft bashing, and possible trolls are becoming a real issue for LtU. Newcomers, attemtping to learn their way into the field, will always be welcome on LtU. Trolls abuse this by asking "naive" questions, and arguing positions that only serve to confuse rather than inform.

A few LtU regulars voiced their concern. I agree: I have been following the discussion group much less closely myself, recently, because of these issues.

LtU wasn't intended to be the only web forum on programming languages, nor do I intend to manage a multitude of forums for all tastes and styles. LtU is intended for the discussion of items thought to be news worthy by the contributing editors. Short topical messages to the forum were ok, as were off topic messages, when LtU was small and not well known. It seems that we as a community need to decide how to keep the original style and commitment to civilized, informed and professional discussion.

Some of the suggestions I received regarding possible modifications to the site and its policies:

1. Closing commenting entirely. I think this is too harsh, since the discussions often contain great ideas and suggestions.

2. Eliminating the option to create new threads in the forum, thus only allowing contributing editors to set the agenda, so to speak.

3. Establishing some sort of comment moderation. I think this is too problematic and requires to much work from the volunteers running the site (including myself).

4. Banning users who use LtU to advertise, post trolls etc. I don't like banning, but I also don't want trolls to alienate long time members. We aren't sure whether there are (non-troll) readers who feel strongly that we should not ban people. How do we decide on policy, as regards banning?

5. Eliminating user signatures (which are appended to all their posts), since they seem to mostly add noise.

My hope, originally, was that the norms of behaviour here will be enough to ensure newcomers understand and maintain the LtU style and unwritten code of behaviour. Perhaps waiting for this to happen is still the best option. We may decide to not let trolls and such dictate our policies, deciding that we can live with them even though they are irritating.

I'd like to hear your opinion. Especially if you are a long time reader and contributor.

Some rules of behaviour are obvious, yet seem to require reiterating and strengthening: personal slurs and attacks and advertisements will not be tolerated. They will be deleted without warning, and repeat offenders will be banned from the site.

Hooray for the winners and judges!!
Link

(For brevity, hand waving ensues.) A personal mantra is that a language isn't worth using for 'real' development if it doesn't have a serious debugger. From what little I've read up on FP, it seems like there are fewer debuggers and fewer 'quality' ones than, say, in the more procedural camps. Might it prevent folks from seriously getting into FP? I think it does scare me away somewhat!

I'm sure there's plenty I'm not aware of so one question is: what debuggers do exist for Haskell, Clean, ML, etc.? (I have read of debuggers for Haskell, but haven't ever used them - are they truly 'commerical quality'?) O'Caml and Lisp have hum-dingers, no?

The second question I have is: do you even want to use a debugger? Or is there something magical about developing with declarative systems that means you don't, or cannot, use one?