[Haskell-cafe] Batteries included (Was: GHC is a monopoly compiler)

[Olaf Klinke]

Can someone please define what exactly a "batteries included" standard library is? IMHO that Python-Haskell comparison is unfair. Although both claim to be general-purpose languages, the focus in Haskell certainly has been on language research for most of its life. 
I recently hacked together a web client in python, my first project in that language. Documentation is excellent. Yet I am still horrified I had to use a language that provides so few static guarantees to control megawatt machines. 

What puts me off Haskell nowadays is the direct result of Haskell's roots in language research: Often when I come across a package that does what I need, it uses the conduit, lens or another idiom, which are like a language in a language to learn. In milder ways Python seems to suffer the same problem. So please, developers: Write more batteries, but make them expose a neat lambda calculus interface if possible that can be combined freely with other batteries. 

Regards,
Olaf