[Haskell-beginners] Q 1 of 2: How stable is Haskell?

[Stephen Tetley]

"Haskell" the language defined by the Haskell Report is very stable -
with one revision in the last decade.

"Glasgow Haskell" the dialect of Haskell provided by default by GHC is
fast moving but changes to the Glasgow Haskell language are mostly
"additions" of new features rather than "removals" or "mutations". GHC
can always use standard Haskell when it is invoked with the
appropriate flag.

The standardized Haskell library i.e the Prelude, is very stable;
though the Prelude is very small you will need more libraries to do
any real work.

The "standard" library of Glasgow Haskell i.e. GHC's base libraries is
fairly stable. Though unlike Glasgow Haskell "the language", changes
to the base libraries can as easily be removals and mutations and not
just additions. Significant breaking changes tend to get parceled up
as part of a major release of GHC, so the changes are well publicized.


In "user land", commonly used libraries / frameworks can be highly
dynamic with breaking changes happening frequently.