[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hoogle and Network.Socket

[Jonathan Cast]

On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 17:54 -0700, John A. De Goes wrote:
> It's a chicken-egg thing. A Linux or OS X developer tries Haskell and  
> finds he can write useful programs right away, with a minimum of fuss.  
> But a Windows user tries Haskell and finds he has access to very few  
> of the really good libraries, and even the cross-platform libraries  
> won't build without substantial effort. As a result, I bet it's easier  
> for a Linux or OS X developer to like Haskell than a Windows developer.
> 
> I use OS X exclusively myself, but I'll ensure my first published  
> Haskell library is cross-platform compatible, because I think it's  
> good for the community. The more people using Haskell, the more  
> libraries that will be written, the more bugs that will be fixed, the  
> more creativity that will be poured into development of libraries and  
> the language itself.

I don't think this is founded in experience.  The experience of the last
5 years is that the more people use Haskell, the more important
backward-compatibility concerns become, and the harder it becomes for
Haskell to continue evolving.

Creativity being poured into a language doesn't do much good if the
result is the language moving sideways, still less the language growing
sideways.

jcc