[Haskell-cafe] Aim Of Haskell

[Justin Bailey]

On 12/15/06, Jason Dagit <dagit at codersbase.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/15/06, Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > The Haskell web server that Simon Peyton-Jones et al described in
> their
> > > paper would be a great example. But where's the download?
> >
> > Let me stress this: HWS is an *exception*. It's the only Haskell related
> > thing that I had trouble to find.
>
> This is the only thing I disagree with in your post.


As someone learning about Haskell while working in "industry", I second the
concerns expressed here. My particular case involves the variety of
"functional reactive programming" libraries and papers out there. After
reading Hudak's School of Expression, I first tried to download the code
referenced in the book. It was pretty stale but someone did the nice work of
making sure Hugs still has a version of the original library that matches
the SOE source. Sort of - once I figured out a few key module changes it was
no big deal.

I've tried to look at other libraries, FRAP and Yampl, but found them both
stale and hard to figure out how to install.

The Haskell community might take a page from the Ruby book here and look at
the "Ruby Gems" package distribution system. It makes install new ruby
libraries and applications as simple as a single command. For example, to
install rails you just type:

  gem install rails

And all the source for the latest released Ruby on Rails is downloaded and
installed on your machine, ready to use. Haskell's compiled nature might
make that a bit more difficult but its still pretty awesome and definiltey
the preferred way of getting libraries out in Ruby community. If you don't
believe me, search the google group "comp.lang.ruby" for emails with "[ANN]"
in the header and you'll see most are distributed via gems.
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