[Haskell-cafe] The Lisp Curse

[Serguey Zefirov]

2011/5/19 Vo Minh Thu <noteed at gmail.com>:
> 2011/5/19 Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>:
>> http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
>>
>> Some of you might have seen this. Here's the short version:
>>
>>  Lisp is so powerful that it discourages reuse. Why search for and reuse an
>> existing implementation, when it's so trivially easy to reimplement exactly
>> what you want yourself? The net result is a maze of incompatible libraries
>> which each solve a different 80% of the same problem.
>>
>> To all the people who look at Hackage, see that there are 6 different
>> libraries for processing Unicode text files, and claim that this is somehow
>> a *good* thing, I offer the above essay as a counter-example.
>
> So what exactly is the problem on hackage and what do you propose as a solution?

The problem is that you have to try several packages before you get to
the stable point.

The solution... I think that some ratings, like "used directly by ###
packages/projects and indirectly by ###" would be nice, but not much.

As for me, I like the diversity of packages. They attack close
problems from different fronts. They express different ideas and
views. I like all that.