Why is Haskell so big?

Question

I am new to Haskell and still enjoy it. One thing that strikes me is that it seems pretty big, with many syntax constructs and libraries that define functions for just about anything. For example, Data.Map defines almost 100 functions. Data.Set also defines many functions, as does Data.List, which also provides many functions, such as Data.Set.

I have my new opinion on why this may be (provide functions for all common templates, reduce noise), but I'm interested in hearing some veteran opinions on this topic.

Answer 1

I would say that the size of the Haskell language is somewhere in between (larger than Lisp, smaller than C ++). Although, since all syntactic sugar has clearly defined translations up to Haskell Core (which has about 7 elements), it is a little difficult to distinguish between a library and a language.

The truth is that libraries contain many small functions, mainly because Haskell programmers found templates that turned on all the time, and then put them into code. As a student, I often had the feeling: “There must be a function to do this,” and then discovered what it was. You study them in the same way as they were written: write the function yourself, and then find it in the documentation for some library in a few days.