[Haskell-cafe] Cal, Clojure, Groovy, Haskell, OCaml, etc.

[Tom Tobin]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Hong Yang <hyangfji at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good libraries are not enough for a language to go beyond mere existence.
> There must exist good documents, i.e., good tutorials, good books, and good
> explanations and examples in the libraries, etc, that are easy for people to
> learn and use. In my humble opinion, Haskell has a lot of libraries, but
> most of them offer few examples of how to use the modules. In this regards,
> Perl is much much better.

This.  As an experienced Pythonista but a beginning Haskeller, there
is *no way* I would have been able to wrap my head around the basics
of Haskell without the tutorage of Learn You A Haskell, Real World
Haskell, and various smaller tutorials scattered around the Haskell
wiki — but I still find the array of libraries confusing (just what
comes with GHC — I'm not even talking about Hackage here), since the
documentation seems to be quite terse compared to Python's docs.  I'm
getting better at reading the code directly, but I'm often at a loss
for what a particular library is good for in the first place.  The
library documentation seems to assume a mathematical or (advanced)
computer science background, and has no problem sending a reader off
to see a journal paper for details — not exactly friendly to those who
are trying their hardest to unlearn their imperative ways as it is.
;-)