[Haskell-cafe] The instability of Haskell libraries

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> writes:

> I'll just quickly mention one factor that contributes:
>
>     * In 2.5 years we've gone from 10 libraries on Hackage to 2023 (literally!)
>
> That is a massive API to try to manage, hence the continuing move to
> focus on automated QA on Hackage, and automated tools -- no one wants
> to have to resolve those dependencies by hand.

I think the "release early, release often" slogan is an affect on this
as well: we encourage library writers to release once they have
something that _works_ rather than waiting until it is perfect.  The
fact that we encourage smaller, more modular libraries over large
monolithic ones also affects this.

When considering Haskell vs Python, I wonder if the "stability" of
Python's libraries is due to their relative maturity in that the
"fundamental" libraries have had time to settle down.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com