On Fri, 2001-09-14 at 15:12, Mark Carroll wrote:

On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Bill Halchin wrote:

...

Probably this question has been brought before. Besides the Preludes, why doesn't

Haskell have libraries like Java, Squeak (Smalltalk). I found this: (snip)

I'm puzzled - it does! - see http://www.haskell.org/libraries/ for some of them.

I think the question is more along the lines of "Why doesn't Haskell come bundled with complete, useful and _supported_ libraries?" For example, the Edison home page describes the library in this way: "in its current state, the library is mostly a framework. That is, I provide signatures, but not yet very many implementations..." This is not the type of thing that your standard software engineer wants to hear. Professional software developers need to be highly productive, and are often unwilling to invest time learning libraries that aren't part of the core language environment. However you feel about the design of the Java Collections API, at least it's a supported part of the language. Developers feel comfortable that any time spent learning the how to use these APIs is worthwhile. I felt this very recently when looking for a quality GUI framework for Haskell. There appear to be many(!) libraries available, and all seem to be in various states of completion. Personally, I would like to see someone complete the port of the Clean library that was attempted, as that library seems to have been pretty battle-tested, and there are lots of good, real-world examples. That, I suppose, is the key point. Whatever libraries are chosen for final inclusion in the Haskell environment, they should be treated as integral to the language experience. Extensive documentation and examples should exist, perhaps of book length (I really liked Hudak's text for this reason, and only wish that it had been written with the "standard" Haskell GUI libs). Finally, any libraries should be beaten upon to such an extent that there is a solid guarantee that they are "safe" for production use. Thoughts? - j -- Jeffrey Palmer Curious Networks, Inc. http://www.curiousnetworks.com e: jeff@curiousnetworks.com