On 12/15/06, Jason Dagit <dagit@codersbase.com> wrote:
On 12/15/06, Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka@gmail.com> wrote:
> > The Haskell web server that Simon Peyton-Jones et al described in their
> > paper would be a great example. But where's the download?
>
> Let me stress this: HWS is an *exception*. It's the only Haskell related
> thing that I had trouble to find.

This is the only thing I disagree with in your post.

As someone learning about Haskell while working in "industry", I second the concerns expressed here. My particular case involves the variety of "functional reactive programming" libraries and papers out there. After reading Hudak's School of Expression, I first tried to download the code referenced in the book. It was pretty stale but someone did the nice work of making sure Hugs still has a version of the original library that matches the SOE source. Sort of - once I figured out a few key module changes it was no big deal.

I've tried to look at other libraries, FRAP and Yampl, but found them both stale and hard to figure out how to install.

The Haskell community might take a page from the Ruby book here and look at the "Ruby Gems" package distribution system. It makes install new ruby libraries and applications as simple as a single command. For example, to install rails you just type:

  gem install rails

And all the source for the latest released Ruby on Rails is downloaded and installed on your machine, ready to use. Haskell's compiled nature might make that a bit more difficult but its still pretty awesome and definiltey the preferred way of getting libraries out in Ruby community. If you don't believe me, search the google group " comp.lang.ruby" for emails with "[ANN]" in the header and you'll see most are distributed via gems.