

Lots of Haskell libraries now. What are we going to do about it? - captain-nemo
http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/there-are-a-hell-of-a-lot-of-haskell-libraries-now-what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it/

======
muuh-gnu
I have never quite understood why language developers never thought providing
their platforms a little bit more like Linux developers do with distributions,
i.e. besides providing libraries only, also provide package managers,
dependency resolvers, test & rate the packages, dump orphaned packages, and so
on.

I encountered this problem especially while learning Lisp. After you learn the
basics of the language, and decide you want to do something productive with
it, you find out that in order to do basic tasks, which other platforms
nowadays include in their standard libraries, wading through and evaluating
all the half-finished libraries all by yourself, because the community wont do
it, will in the long run take more time than you needed to deal with the
language itself.

~~~
jrockway
It's unfair to extrapolate your experience with Lisp to the rest of the
programming languages. CL has the most anti-social community in existence --
half the people on #lisp will tell you that libraries and standards are evil,
and that each app should always roll its own everything.

If you like other people and using libraries, don't use Common Lisp.

~~~
lispm
That's the most anti-social nonsense I've read for a long time.

~~~
jrockway
Hey, I like CL, it's one of my favorite languages. But the community just
isn't the same as the Haskell or Perl community. Haskell and Perl people love
building tiny pieces that all work together. Lisp programmers love building
huge apps that work exactly like the original author wants.

One is nice for the individual, one is nice for the community. Lisp is a
language for individuals.

~~~
lispm
FUD!

Who do you think wrote cliki.net, planet.lisp.org, paste.lisp.org, ASDF, ASDF-
Install, XCVB, CLBUILD, runs common-lisp.net, wrote www.cl-user.net, organizes
the International Lisp Conference, organizes European Lisp meetings, organizes
various local user groups, wrote the software libraries listed here
<http://www.cliki.net/Library> ??????????? Edi Weitz did not provide his
starter pack??? He did not publish his regex engine, his webserver, his...

There are no libraries in LibCL? <http://libcl.com/libcl-current/index.html>

Check out the list of ASDF-Installable libraries here:
<http://www.cliki.net/ASDF-Install>

Even Franz Inc., a commercial Lisp vendor publishes their stuff under a free
license on Github: <http://github.com/franzinc>

It's not that things can't be improved, but saying that CL users are against
sharing and reusing code is the biggest bullshit I heard for a long time.

Before you had any ideas Lisp existed, Symbolics users were collecting user
contributions and publishing tapes - when no networks and other distribution
media were widely available.

Before software repositories were common, Common Lisp user Mark Kantrowitz was
collecting every available library:

<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/Groups/AI/0.html>

Just see under areas [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-
repository/ai/areas/...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-
repository/ai/areas/0.html) and lang/lisp/
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-
repository/ai/lang/l...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-
repository/ai/lang/lisp/0.html)

Many of these people currently contributing you will find on #lisp .

------
nimrody
Is it just me or do other people find the documentation on hackageDB lacking
and too often very beginner-unfriendly?

Something similar to Perl's <http://perldoc.perl.org/> (really excellent!)
would do a lot to help beginning Haskellers!

