Re: [Haskell-cafe] The Lisp Curse

2011/5/19 Vo Minh Thu :

2011/5/19 Andrew Coppin :

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http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

Some of you might have seen this. Here's the short version:

 Lisp is so powerful that it discourages reuse. Why search for and reuse an existing implementation, when it's so trivially easy to reimplement exactly what you want yourself? The net result is a maze of incompatible libraries which each solve a different 80% of the same problem.

To all the people who look at Hackage, see that there are 6 different libraries for processing Unicode text files, and claim that this is somehow a *good* thing, I offer the above essay as a counter-example.

So what exactly is the problem on hackage and what do you propose as a solution?

The problem is that you have to try several packages before you get to the stable point. The solution... I think that some ratings, like "used directly by ### packages/projects and indirectly by ###" would be nice, but not much. As for me, I like the diversity of packages. They attack close problems from different fronts. They express different ideas and views. I like all that.