Re: forwarded message on the importance of libraries

On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Isaac Jones wrote:

Garry Hodgson writes:

"Isaac Jones" wrote:

...

Haskell' will be a conservative refinement of Haskell 98. It will be the work of this committee to adopt a set of language extensions and modifications and to standardize *a new set of libraries.* [emphasis mine]

excellent. just please please please don't give short shrift to the libraries, as this is what will make or break any effort to make haskell more useful to the development community at large.

I entirely agree that Haskell in general needs a large set of libraries. However, whether it should have a large set of *standardised* libraries is more questionable. In particular, standardised libraries can't be changed very easily. What's the general feeling on this? The only mention of this issue on trac seems to be "define criteria for including libraries", so I guess noone is quite sure yet :-)

excellent. play close attention to the "out of the box" experience. if i can install it, run the examples, maybe have some useful command among them, i'm far more likely to invest the effort to go further.

We can have a large set of libraries distributed with every implementation without having those be fixed into the standard, though.

there's a threshold of effort required to adopt any new language. the lower you can make that threshold, the more people will take that first step.

Entirely agreed. Cheers, Ganesh