[Haskell-cafe] The Lisp Curse

[Andrew Coppin]

On 19/05/2011 08:39 PM, Felipe Almeida Lessa wrote:

> Regarding the Unicode problem, there is a standard solution today: use
> the text package.  Yes, you may use other libraries, but text is the
> recommended one.

Is that true? Last I heard, there was still some debate about the 
relative performance of the various libraries. (I don't recall hearing 
much argument about API though, so presumably everybody more or less 
agrees on that.)

> The problem is that no one coming to Hackage discovers that on Hackage
> itself.  You have to dig the Internet to find some blog post telling
> you what to do.  And hope that the blog post isn't old.

...I suppose what I just wrote basically confirms this. I remember 
seeing some traffic about text performance, but I wasn't paying enough 
attention at the time to remember the precise details. (Or perhaps it's 
just that this specific subject area isn't generally all that important 
to me.)

> So we really need a way of raking libraries in Hackage.  We already
> have the Haskell Platform, which is really really nice, but the HP
> can't embrace everything.  For everything outside HP, a ranking system
> is needed.

Sounds like a good idea to me. My only minor worry is that when a 
once-popular library becomes superceeded by a superior competetor, the 
old library will still have a really good rating, and people might not 
"find" the new replacement.

Then again, how often is that likely to happen?