Jeffrey Palmer writes:

I think the question is more along the lines of "Why doesn't Haskell come bundled with complete, useful and _supported_ libraries?"

There's an ongoing effort to rectify the situation. There is a mailing list: libraries@haskell.org, which you can join by going to http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries (there are archives of previous discussion there too). A draft document describes the current plan: http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/libraries/libraries.html and what source code we have so far is in CVS: http://cvs.haskell.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/fptools/libraries/ Cheers, Simon