Polymorphism in the Prelude

[Edward Kmett]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 3:59 AM, Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info> wrote:

>
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 10:33 AM, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Based on raw download stats:
>>
>> basic-prelude has probably received the most traction. It has ~8k
>> downloads.
>>
>> classy-prelude decays to ~4k downloads.
>>
>> general-prelude ~180.
>>
>> The other two I mentioned have had ~100 each.
>>
>> By way of comparison something like, say, 'profunctors' has ~50k
>> downloads.
>>
>
> That is interesting, thank you for sharing! Are you using direct downlaods
> of profunctor? because profunctor is designed to be a library dependency
> (lens depends on it as do 20+ other packages), whereas with classy-prelude
> users are advised to not use it as a library dependency and only use it for
> their applications. There is only really one library with usage that depend
> on classy-prelude, classy-prelude-conduit, and only classy-prelude-yesod
> depends on that, and nothing depends on that, they are all designed for
> application writers, not as library dependencies.
>
> Does it makes sense to make a direct comparison of total downloads for
> these 2 different use cases?
>

It isn't a perfect comparison, but if we're looking at adoption, adoption
is adoption regardless of whether the library is sold for a very limited
application-oriented usecase. Haskell is the sum of library authors and
application authors (and students who will probably never write a library).
All we're doing is bringing the non-controversial parts of base that people
already use every day into the standard Prelude, where it can benefit each
group.

A proposal that says "well, application authors can just use X" ignores the
large mass of library authors out there when it just doesn't have to. we
have a straightforward path to monotonic improvement over the status quo,
lets take it.

Again, my reaction is mostly measured by the fact that I've actively asked
folks in person about this as I travel around to user groups and ask "what
is it that the core library committee could do that would make Haskell
better for you" and have received a lot of feedback, it isn't just driven
by those numbers.

-Edward
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