[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] GHC is a monopoly compiler

[Florian Weimer]

* Michael Sloan:

> So in other words, the Python guys knew that an approach like Haskell
> Platform would never work well, and so they didn't do it.  Instead
> they built one big excellent standard library.

But this approach causes problems.  There are quite a few example
where Python got things wrong and did not fix them for a long time due
to backwards compatibility concerns.  Examples are HTTPS with host
name validation, and email parsing.  The trouble is that if you get it
wrong, you still have to support it for a long time (perhaps
eternally) because your users want to upgrade the platform without
rewriting their software.

In the Haskell context, an early batteries-included version of the
standard library would likely have relied extensively on
strings-as-lists and lazy I/O, and the latter is somewhat
controversial these days (the former is rather inefficient).