Re: [Haskell-cafe] The instability of Haskell libraries

ivan.miljenovic:

Don Stewart writes:

...

I'll just quickly mention one factor that contributes:

* In 2.5 years we've gone from 10 libraries on Hackage to 2023 (literally!)

That is a massive API to try to manage, hence the continuing move to focus on automated QA on Hackage, and automated tools -- no one wants to have to resolve those dependencies by hand.

I think the "release early, release often" slogan is an affect on this as well: we encourage library writers to release once they have something that _works_ rather than waiting until it is perfect. The fact that we encourage smaller, more modular libraries over large monolithic ones also affects this.

When considering Haskell vs Python, I wonder if the "stability" of Python's libraries is due to their relative maturity in that the "fundamental" libraries have had time to settle down.

Note also that the Python core libraries model is what we are now just starting to do via the Haskell Platform. We're far more immature in that respect -- our stable, core, blessed library suite only just had its 2nd release.