[Haskell-cafe] libraries [was GUI haters]

gladstein at gladstein.com gladstein at gladstein.com
Fri Apr 2 12:39:07 EDT 2010


As a working engineer, one of my greatest frustrations is my inability
to use Haskell in the workplace. The unfortunate fact is that my media
industry clients use mostly Windows, some Macs, and no linux except for
servers. The core system works everywhere, but many contributed
libraries don't. GUIs are the big showstopper.
 
One of the reasons Java won out over Common Lisp is that it had huge
libraries. Franz's libraries were superb but few in number. One diehard
Lisp user converted his lab to Java because "Java gives you everything
you want, for free."
 
That languages are distinct from their libraries escapes a lot of
people; they see each language as a package. I met a COBOL programmer
recently (I'm not making this up) that was looking into Java. He didn't
see how people could use it, he said, because it had "thousands of
commands". 
 
I'll stop whining now.



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