forwarded message on the importance of libraries

[Sam Goldman]

Hi--

> On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Isaac Jones wrote:
> 
>> Garry Hodgson writes:
>>
>> "Isaac Jones" <isaac.jones at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>     Haskell' will be a conservative refinement of Haskell 98. It will
>>>     be the work of this committee to adopt a set of language
>>>     extensions and modifications and to standardize *a new set of
>>>     libraries.* [emphasis mine]
>>
>> excellent.  just please please please don't give short shrift to the 
>> libraries, as this is what will make or break any effort to make 
>> haskell more useful to the development community at large.
> 
> I entirely agree that Haskell in general needs a large set of libraries.

Yes! What libraries do people want that haven't been done? I wouldn't 
mind doing some boring coding tasks in Haskell to pass the time.

> However, whether it should have a large set of *standardised* libraries 
> is more questionable. In particular, standardised libraries can't be 
> changed very easily.
> 
> What's the general feeling on this? The only mention of this issue on 
> trac seems to be "define criteria for including libraries", so I guess 
> noone is quite sure yet :-)

Is Haskell' going to standardize on Cabal (or even HackageDB)? Maybe for 
later, but it might be worth considering how that interacts with any 
kind of standardized library, since you'd get versioned dependencies 
(consistency) for free.

I don't mean to suggest that it's a good idea, however, or an idea at 
all -- just a thought.

>> excellent.  play close attention to the "out of the box" experience.
>> if i can install it, run the examples, maybe have some useful
>> command among them, i'm far more likely to invest the effort
>> to go further.
> 
> We can have a large set of libraries distributed with every 
> implementation without having those be fixed into the standard, though.

HackageDB will definitely take some of the pressure off implementations 
in this respect.