[Haskell-cafe] The instability of Haskell libraries

[Don Stewart]

ivan.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.
> 

Note also that the Python core libraries model is what we are now just
starting to do via the Haskell Platform. We're far more immature in
that respect -- our stable, core, blessed library suite only just had
its 2nd release.