[Haskell-cafe] lost in generics

[Rustom Mody]

I need some help finding my way around the various generics libraries.

My usage scenario is -- at least to start with -- the ASTs of programming
languages.

It appears to me that there are two generations of generics -- earlier there
was generic haskell and strafunski
Now there is uniplate and kure (and syb? -- not sure of its generation...)

I get this impression because I saw a comment somewhat along these lines.

And also the very first reference link on the strafunski webpage:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_libraries/Generic_programming/Strafunski
viz http://www.cs.vu.nl/Strafunski/
seems to be dead. So I am wondering whether strafunski is still under
development or is it defunct?

The following paras from
http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/techreps/repo/CS-2008/2008-010.pdf

The current status of generic programming in Haskell is comparable
> to the lazy Tower of Babel preceding the birth of Haskell
> in the eighties [Hudak et al., 2007]. We have many single-site languages
> or libraries, each individually lacking critical mass in terms
> of language/library-design effort, implementations, and users.
>


Although generic programming has been used in several applications,
> it has few users for real-life projects. This is understandable.
> Developing a large application takes a couple of years, and
> choosing a particular approach to generic programming for such a
> project involves a risk. Few approaches that have been developed
> over the last decade are still supported, and there is a high risk that
> the chosen approach will not be supported anymore, or that it will
> change in a backwards-incompatible way in a couple of years time.
>

 sound omninous :-)

In general my question is:  What is alive/active and what is alive/active
and what is -- um -- moved-on-from.
And of course which are easier and which more difficult to dig into.

Thanks

Rusi
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