[Haskell-cafe] Re: Definition of the Haskell standard library

[Dave Bayer]

Chris Smith <cdsmith <at> twu.net> writes:

> Can someone clarify what's going on with the standard library in 
> Haskell?
...
> sites for the thousandth time before realizing that so-and-so's GUI 
> library hasn't actually been touched since they finished their class 

Short answer: Our system is very democratic.

Long answer:

You remind me of the usual academic debate, what to do about students using
the web to do research? There's a lot of uncertain information out there,
the right answer is to teach discrimination skills.

Put differently, take the most famous problem in computer science, "P vs
NP". If a genie in a bottle is going to lie to you a couple of times before
telling you a truth you can easily check, you're still better off.

In, say, Perl, it's all about the libraries. One connects lots of pieces
one doesn't understand with short bits of line noise, and gets serious
real-world work done.

That's one pole in a range of attitudes. I may be near the other pole; in a
hurry I'll use libraries included with GHC without looking at the source
code. I view anything else in hackage as a truly awesome repository of
sample code. It's on me to make sure that it works, or that I should be
using it at all, rather than doing something else.

My pet example is a PDF library. No language should have its own PDF
library, when Postscript is so easy to write, and "Ghostscript" is a
cross-platform conversion tool maintained by thousands of our best and
brightest.

So our Haskell desire to have lots of libraries is another version of "How
big should a language be?" The Common Lisp specification has an appendix
bigger than the Scheme specification in its entirety.

I've gone through several cycles in the last decade of getting rid of half
my possessions; I get more than twice the utility out of what's left, in
part because I understand and I can find what's left. Programming languages
are the same story; I prefer lean.