a proposal regarding libraries

[Josef Svenningsson]

Hi,

On 3/2/06, Isto Aho <isto.aho at dnainternet.net> wrote:
<idea about library competition snipped>

If there is enough interes in this kind of activity, there is a need for a
> couple of volunteers to organize everything and to work as judges on the
> competition days (or weeks). They should decide, what the competition
> is about etc.  What do you think? Pros & Cons? Would you take part
> in this kind of competition(s), if these were organized?


I don't think these kinds of competitions work in open source development.
Especially not with such a small community as Haskell's. The beauty of open
source development is the cooperation between programmers that share their
code and discuss ideas with others. All that disappears when you start a
competition because sharing code and discussing ideas might help others
rather than helping yourself. Read the following article for further
information:
http://www.osx86project.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=127&Itemid=2


But that being said, I still applaude your initiative and the fact that
you're trying to come up with some concrete and constructive ideas as to how
we might get some more libraries. We do indeed need more libraries. I think
one of our problems here is that people somehow set to bar too high. I get
the feeling that people are afraid of showing their code (I know I am)
because they think that it must be very well-polished and have a very
well-thought-though design. It's like everything Haskell needs to be elegant
and beautiful as a mathematical theorem. But it will probably do us good to
allow for some hackish libraries. They can always be improved upon later.

Cheers,

/Josef
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