Contribution vs quality, and a few notes on the Platform process

[Ian Lynagh]

I'm not sure what to put this thought in reply to, so I'll just put it
here:

One criticism that I feel I've seen a lot, about the standard libraries
of many languages, is that they are inconsistent; e.g. this sort of
thing, about Java:

    It’s also interesting to note that Hashtable, another important
    standard library class, does not have any final methods.
    As mentioned elsewhere in this book, it’s quite obvious that some
    classes were designed by completely different people than others.
    (Notice the brevity of the method names in Hashtable compared to
    those in Vector.) This is precisely the sort of thing that should
    not be obvious to consumers of a class library. When things are
    inconsistent it just makes more work for the user. Yet another paean
    to the value of design and code walkthroughs. 

(from the last paragraph of http://www.codeguru.com/java/tij/tij0071.shtml)

My hope is that the Haskell Platform can avoid this, and therefore that
we will use a process that helps us avoid it.


Thanks
Ian