[Haskell-cafe] The Lisp Curse

[Eric Rasmussen]

I only recently started learning Haskell and have had a difficult time
convincing other Python hackers to come on board. I see two things that
might help:

1) A resource to make informed decisions about different libraries.
Something that includes specific criteria like how long a library has been
out, how often it's maintained, how many people use it, etc. Ideally you'd
be able to see a quick table comparison of features across libraries that
perform similar tasks (roughly translated to something like: "this xml
library is well established, has great documentation, and works for most
parsing tasks, while this other one is much faster but not widely used
yet").

2) Languages like Python make it easy to write fast performing code in a few
lines that will read/write files, split strings, and build lists or
dictionaries/associative arrays. There are very clever ways of doing all
these things Haskell, but it can involve several qualified imports and time
researching ByteStrings/Lazy ByteStrings/ByteString.Char8. It would be nice
to have a single module that exports some common text operations via
ByteStrings without requiring a lot of upfront research time learning to
work with ByteStrings, and possibly a limited export of Data.Map features as
well.

The second one would hold little interest for advanced developers of course,
but when someone is faced with a difficult learning task, if you give them a
strong starting point that produces results it can help motivate them to
keep learning. Is anyone working on either of these things or interested in
working on them? I'm not quite ready to produce high quality Haskell code
yet, but I'd like to contribute if I can.


On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 3:42 PM, David Leimbach <leimy2k at gmail.com> wrote:

> See the Haskell Platform.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On May 19, 2011, at 1:56 PM, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On 19/05/2011 09:34 PM, vagif.verdi at gmail.com wrote:
> >> Andrew, you are being non constructive.
> >
> > It seems I'm being misunderstood.
> >
> > Some people seem to hold the opinion that more libraries = better. I'm
> trying to voice the opinion that there is such a thing as too many
> libraries. The article I linked to explains part of why this is the case, in
> a better way than I've been able to phrase it myself.
> >
> > I'm not trying to say "OMG, the way it is now completely sucks!" I'm not
> trying to say "you must do X right now!" I'm just trying to put forward an
> opinion. The opinion that having too many libraries can be a problem, which
> some people don't seem to agree with. (Obviously it isn't *always* bad, I'm
> just saying that sometimes it can be.)
> >
> > That's all I was trying to say.
> >
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