a proposal regarding libraries

[Isto Aho]

Josef Svenningsson wrote:

> On 3/2/06, *Isto Aho* <isto.aho at dnainternet.net
> <mailto:isto.aho at dnainternet.net>> wrote:
> <idea about library competition snipped>
>
>     is about etc.  What do you think? Pros & Cons? Would you take part
>
>
> I don't think these kinds of competitions work in open source
> development. Especially not with such a small community as Haskell's.

What do you think of the discriminating hackers competition?

> 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
> <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

Ok & thanks! Maybe the idea was bad. However, I was thinking
something very much simpler than in the article not involving
any money.  Idea was to have a "speed contents" (who does most in
a few moments - there is no time to steal or exchange ideas), "with
relatively easy tasks" (like some statistical distributions, tests,
density functions found
from elementary text books or some missing utility functions, if
there are such etc), "with spirit to do quickly something to be
reorganized later". But of course, if the user base is so small that
topic would be interesting to only a couple of users, then who would
do the reorganization or just maintenance - probably nobody. 
Isn't this situation the "egg-chicken" problem?

> 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

The other thing that I consider a barrier is the often mentioned truth
that there are lots of other libs available in other languages and FFI.
Somehow, this sounds like "if you need to do math, use octave, R etc,
but not Haskell".  Why to introduce an extensive Haskell math or
some other lib?  Feeling like I could list tons of reasons but probably
none really strong ones :)

> some hackish libraries. They can always be improved upon later.

Yep!

br, Isto