[bitmadness]

This is exactly the main problem with Haskell. A stunning language with a lousy standard library. In my opinion, Haskell should offer arrays and maps as built-ins (like Go) and ship with crypto, networking, and serialization in the standard library (I know serialization is already there, but everyone seems to prefer Cereal, so...)

[lmm]

> (I know serialization is already there, but everyone seems to prefer Cereal, so...)

This is precisely why shipping things in the standard library is a bad idea. It ends up full of cruft that no-one uses because there are better alternatives.

[wyager]

>Haskell should offer arrays and maps as built-ins

Why? What does that gain?

The standard platform provides Data.Map for maps, Data.Vector for arrays, and Data.Sequence for fast-edit sequences.

It's not even clear what a "built-in" array or map in Haskell would even look like, or what semantics it should have. Especially in a pure functional language, you need to be clearer about what your intentions are. A regular mutable packed array won't work most of the time.

[runeks]

    > This is exactly the main problem with Haskell.
    > A stunning language with a lousy standard library.

I dream of the day where we can say that the main problem of Haskell is which libraries are included in the standard library. To me, we would already have reached programming nirvana at that point.

[tibbe]

Agreed, except for the "like Go" part, which is unnecessarily ad-hoc.