[Haskell-beginners] Haskell package maturity

[emacstheviking]

Andrew,

The sheer number of packages is overwhelming and you can spend a very long
time indeed trying to find something "suitable"... which... eventually may
lead one to the conclusion, "It'll be quicker to roll my own" and then
"Hey, I will upload it to Hackage, someone else might like it"... and so
the list grows and grows and what began as an altruistic thought serves
only to make it harder for the next guy to "find a suitable package".

Personally, I've walked away from Haskell purely because I got fed up being
continually bitten by "cabal hell".
It's a shame because apart from LISP no other language has had such an
impact on my thinking.

I did find that whatever package I used though, they tend to work, so maybe
take the first one and get on with it, that's what I used to do.

Hope that helped, it probably didn't.
All the best,
Sean Charles.


On 28 September 2015 at 16:15, Andrew Bernard <andrew.bernard at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Since starting to look on Hackage for packages for such vital things as
> queues and algorithms, I am surprised to see very low numbers of downloads
> for packages that seem to me to be vitally important. For example,
> queuelike has only been downloaded 1617 times since being uploaded in 2009.
> Similar very low numbers seem to apply for many packages. Another example
> is cubicspline with only 485 downloads.
>
> My question is, are the numbers on Hackage correct, and if so, do they
> indicate hardly anybody uses them, or indeed Haskell? I am starting to
> wonder.
>
> I also notice version numbers are very low, often less than one and most
> often around 0.1 or so. This is either a display of extreme modesty on the
> part of Haskell library code developers (in fact, often found in open
> source communities), or an indication of lack of maturity of the code.
> Overall I am puzzled about this. I am trying to establish what packages to
> use in my coding and there seems to be little indication of what to choose,
> and how to assess code maturity. What am I missing?
>
> Andrew
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Beginners mailing list
> Beginners at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beginners
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/beginners/attachments/20150930/de1683bb/attachment-0001.html>