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Since you're already keeping a text file, have you considered using nix (the package manager) to declare all your software packages?
If you don't want a package cluttering up your system, but also don't want to forget about its existence you can just comment it out.
I believe that IPFS together with Filecoin is intended to be something like this in a broader, free market sense. Unfortunately IPFS is probably far from ready for mission critical apps and Filecoin hasn't launched at all.
From what I've heard most land-use in the world goes towards animal agriculture - mainly for growing feed. Don't quote me, but I think it's over 40% of all land use in the USA. On balance I'd be far more concerned about the destruction of habitat for already endangered wildlife.
Try elm (http://elm-lang.org/) first; it doesn't mention Functor, Applicative, Monoid, Monad anywhere.
You might come back to Haskell later and it won't seem like such a big deal. (I use Haskell for serious work and love that a quick patch doesn't suddenly start breaking things in 10 other places - it's a real time-saver!)
There's a proposal at the moment to reduce comma-noise a bit, which I think might help the situation if it's accepted: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm-discuss/PMGBcspBDiM/m6a3...
It's nice to see elm-html-shorthand in the wild. Please let me know what needs improving.
(Task x) has monadic structure, yes (see andThen, succeed). Naturally it also looks like Functor, Applicative, etc.
However, there is no way to work with monads in the abstract in Elm (yet), there is only the concrete API.
I've defined (?) in http://package.elm-lang.org/packages/circuithub/elm-maybe-ex... in the mean time.
Our core services at https://circuithub.com is built on Haskell.
We all like simple tools. Complexity kills. It makes our work difficult and gives us much steeper learning curve. Programmers need to know how things work. Otherwise, they feel insecure. If we work with a complex system, then we have a big gap between “I am using it” and “I know how it works”.
One answer to this problem of opaqueness in abstractions is having a well defined denotational semantics. This makes it clear that something can work in one way & only one way (without the need to dive into library internals). I feel that Elm is doing a pretty good job of tackling this for GUIs and signals.
We've been using it to render schematic symbols and PCB footprints at CircuitHub.com (this has been going on for a couple of months). I'm testing it out in other areas of the product at the moment, so if all goes well additional Elm widgets might land on our site very soon.
Can anyone provide a comparison with Nix? I wonder if they considered working with the Nix developers, sharing is good for the ecosystem :)
I always find it a bit sad when cool technology is snubbed on the basis of syntax... Elm especially, since Evan works so hard at making the language approachable
Not at the moment, but we are considering a few alternatives.
To clarify, CircuitHub will not disclose private designs to anyone outside of CircuitHub and our manufacturing partners. We take this very seriously! If you have any concerns about the confidentiality of your design, feel free to contact us at support at circuithub.com.
Thanks for the feedback! Dropbox makes it convenient to create a revision of your project at any point during the design (and you can create as many revisions as you'd like). This helps with revision control, but more importantly it allows you to keep tabs on manufacturing costs during development.
Acid-State for haskell (http://acid-state.seize.it/) is based on a similar ideology and in the public domain. (Oh, but minus the time dimension I'm afraid.)