[Haskell-cafe] Haskell versus F#, OCaml, et. al. ...

[Hans van Thiel]

On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 01:55 -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
> dons:
> > kr.angelov:
> > > On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 8:46 AM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> > > > There's almost 800 Haskell libraries on hackage.haskell.org (millions of
> > > > lines of code). On average, 2 new libraries are released each day
> > > > (though 12 new libs were released in the last 24 hours). That's 700 new
> > > > libraries a year at the current rate.
> > > 
> > > This is missleading and depends on how you count the libraries. For
> > > instance "base" is now split into "arrays", "containers", "process",
> > > "parallel" .... etc. In the same time on platforms like Java and .NET
> > > this might be only one package.
> 
> Basically, pick a way to divide this graph of the libraries, and what
> they depend on, sensibly into units, and you'll know how many
> "libraries" there are, with distinct capabilities,
> 
>     http://galois.com/~dons/tmp/hackage.png
> 
> -- Don
> 
But not all 'libraries' are libraries, some are applications. The
difference, IMO, is that a library is meant to be used in other
programs, possibly very different ones. An application is for a specific
purpose. Another way to put it, to use a library you need a (documented)
API, to use an application you need a user guide (or not, in the rare
case it's self documenting).

I feel it's a mistake not to distinguish between those two, in
particular when the number of packages gets very large, as is now
happening.

Secondly, some major libraries are not on Hackage (yet), e.g. Gtk2Hs.

Regards,

Hans van Thiel