Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Go Haskell! -> array libraries

Lennart Augustsson wrote:

But I don't want Perl, I want a well designed language and well designed libraries. I think it's find to let libraries proliferate, but at some point you also need to step back and abstract.

I agree.

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Don Stewart wrote:

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andrewcoppin:

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What *I* propose is that somebody [you see what I did there?] should sit down, take stock of all the multitudes of array libraries, what features they have, what obvious features they're missing, and think up a good API from scratch. Once we figure out what the best way to arrange all this stuff is, *then* we attack the problem of implementing it for real.

It seems lots of people have written really useful code, but we need to take a step back and look at the big picture here before writing any more of it.

No.

My view would be to let the free market of developers decide what is best. No bottlenecks -- there's too many Haskell libraries already (~1000 now).

And this approach has yielded more code than ever before, more libraries than ever before, and library authors are competing.

So let the market decide. We're a bazaar, not a cathedral.

I find this kind of attitude disturbing. Are you seriously asserting that it's "bad" for people to stop and think about their designs before building? That it's "bad" for people to get together and coordinate their efforts? Would you really prefer each and every developer to reinvent the wheel until we have 50,000 equivilent but slightly different wheel implementations? Certainly you seem obsessed with the notion that "more packages on Hackage == better". Well in my book, quantity /= quality. (The latter being vastly more important than the former - while admittedly far harder to measure objectively.) I would far prefer to see one well-written library that solves the problem properly than see 25 incompatible libraries that all solve small fragments of the problem poorly. In the latter case, there will be no "competition" between libraries; everybody will just give up and not use *any* of them. You _can_ have too much choice! I really hope I'm not the only person here who sees it this way...