On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Steve Severance
whenever I here any open source community (yeah...everyone not just haskell) tell beginners to contribute a package I always scratch my head with a little bit of wonder. Would you really want a package that someone like me who is still trying to figure out how to utilize haskell's features would build? Do you want my outrageous non-use of the Monads that haskell offers?
Can I just take up this point and say, yes I do. It's much easier to fix a bad library than write a good one :P Besides, I'd think that often what Haskell developers lack is time more than skill - there are plenty of tasks that could be done without advanced knowledge of deep abstractions, if only someone could put aside a few weekends for them. For example, writing low-level FFI bindings is almost mechanical (i.e. requires basically no actual ingenuity) with the right tools, but it takes time and effort, so libraries go unbound. In short, you do not need a PhD to write a decent and useful library! Just open a github and give out commit access like confetti and everything will be fine :) I also think that it's a good idea to review Haskell packages more thoroughly, but I think shiny-new-hackage is going to help a little in that regard with reverse dependencies prominently visible on package pages. I also think that it should be convention to link every hackage package with a page on the wiki for discussion (perhaps creating a new namespace in mediawiki for this purpose). This would be as simple as adding an autogenerated link to hackage's template. This is not a new idea, but it's yet to be popularised, and I think it needs backing from Hackage itself to do that.