[Haskell-cafe] [haskell-cafe] Some reflections on Haskell

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Wed Feb 15 03:58:50 CET 2012


Markus: "What about hoogle/hayoo and hackage?"

Antoine: "Do you have any links to examples that we should imitate?"

Hackage is notionally similar to the Java API documentation at
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/
But Hackage "Documentation" pages typically only give syntax, while Java
pages invariably summarize semantics.  This makes a world of difference.
The quality of the summaries bespeaks a lot of editorial attention
above and beyond culling annotations from source code.

Considerable care has been taken in describing the GHC library at
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/
but even there one can find absolute mystery entries like
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/haskell98-2.0.0.1/Locale.html

Doug

> It is hard to find one's way in this ecosystm. It needn't be,
> as Java illustrates. To my mind Java's great contribution to the
> world is its library index--light years ahead of typical
> "documentation" one finds at haskell.org, which lacks the guiding
> hand of a flesh-and-blood librarian. In this matter, it
> seems, industrial curation can achieve clarity more easily than
> open source.



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