[Haskell-cafe] Correspondence between libraries and modules

[Rustom Mody]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 9:44 PM, Gregg Lebovitz <glebovitz at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Rustom,
>
> I am drafting a document that captures some of the social norms from the
> comments on this list, mostly from Brandon and Wren. I have captured the
> discussion about module namespace and am sorting out the comments on the
> relationship between libraries and packages.
>
> My initial question to the list was to try an identify where Haskell is
> different from other open source distributions. From what I can tell, the
> issues are very similar. The module name space seems to have
> characteristics very similar to the include file hierarchy of linux
> distributions.
>
> If you have some spare cycles and would like to contribute, I think
> everyone would appreciate your help and effort
>
> Gregg
>

Hi Gregg.

One of the common complaints one gets from a first year programming student
(and its now about 3 decades I dealing with these!) is:

"The compiler/interpreter etc HAS a BUG!!!"

So...
While I am an old geezer with programming and functional programming --
doing, teaching, playing, implementing, or just plain thinking but  -- I am
too much of a noob to ghc to risk falling into the "1st year student" trap
above.

Yes perhaps not a typical noob...
Somethings are easier for me than the typical noob -- all the 'classical'
good-stuff like pattern-matching, lambda-calculus, type-inferencing,
polymorphism etc.
And this is helpful to understand the 'modern good stuff' starting monads
and onwards

But then I get hit -- finding my way round hackage, installing with cabal
etc -- even tho I'm an ol-time unix hacker and sysadmin-er.

So I guess its best to assume (as of now) that I dont know the ropes rather
than something is wrong/broken with them.

O well... If the noob trap is one error playing it safe is probably another
so here goes with me saying things that I (probably) know nothing about:
1. cabal was a beautiful system 10 years ago.  Now its being forcibly
scaled up 2 (3?) orders of magnitude and is creaking at the seams
2. There's too much conflicting suggestions out there on the web for a noob
    - use system install (eg apt-get) or use cabal
    - cabal in user area or system area etc
    - the problem is exponentiated by the absence of cabal uninstall
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