On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Hong Yang
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. ;-)