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

[John Smith]

On 09/11/2010 00:13, Ian Lynagh wrote:
>
> 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.

Haskell is much better in this regard. We do not need to compare different classes to find inconsistencies; the Monoid 
class was named by category theorists, but its functions were named by people who consider all data to be lists.