Evolution of a haskell repository and its use of monads: an exploratory study of stackage
Authors: 
Paul Leger, 
Felipe Ruiz, Nicolás Sepúlveda, and Ismael FigueroaAuthors Info & Claims
Paul Leger, Felipe Ruiz, Nicolás Sepúlveda, and Ismael FigueroaAuthors Info & ClaimsApril 2022
Pages 1475 - 1482
Abstract
Package repositories for a programming language are increasingly common. A repository can keep a register of the evolution of its packages. In the programming language Haskell, with its defining characteristic monads, we can find the Stackage repository, which is a curated repository for stable Haskell packages in the Hackage repository. Despite the widespread use of Stackage in its industrial target, we are not aware of much empirical research about how this repository has evolved, including the use of monads. This paper presents an empirical study that covers the evolution of fourteen Long-Term Support (LTS) releases (period 2014 - 2020) of available packages (12.46 gigabytes), including the use of monads from the mtl package that provides the standard monad core (e.g., state, reader, continuations). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale analysis of the evolution of the Stackage repository with regard to packages used and monads. Our findings show, for example, a growing trend of packages is depending on other packages whose versions are not available in a particular release of Stackage; opening a potential stability issue. Like previous studies, these results may evidence how developers use Haskell and give guidelines to Stackage maintainers.
References
[1]
Algehed, M., and Russo, A. Encoding DCC in Haskell. In Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (Dallas, USA, Oct. 2017), ACM, pp. 77--89.
[2]
Benton, N., Hughes, J., and Moggi, E. Monads and Effects. In Applied Semantics (Caminha, Portugal, Sept. 2002), G. Barthe, P. Dybjer, L. Pinto, and J. Saraiva, Eds., pp. 42--122.
[3]
Bezirgiannis, N., Jeuring, J., and Leather S. Usage of Generic Programming on Hackage. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Generic programming - WGP '13 (New York, USA, 2013), p. 47.
[4]
Chinthanet, B., Kula, R. G., McIntosh, S., Ishio, T., Ihara, A., and Matsumoto, K. Lags in the release, adoption, and propagation of npm vulnerability fixes. Empirical Software Engineering 26, 3 (may 2021), 47.
[5]
De Meuter, W. Monads as a theoretical foundation for aop. In International Workshop on Aspect-Oriented Programming at ECOOP (Jyvåskylå, Finland, June 1997), vol. 25, pp. 31--36.
[6]
Decan, A., Mens, T., Claes, M., and Grosjean, P. On the Development and Distribution of R Packages. In Proceedings of the 2015 European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (New York, NY, USA, sep 2015), ACM, pp. 1--6.
[7]
Decan, A., Mens, T., and Constantinou, E. On the Evolution of Technical Lag in the NPM Package Dependency Network. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME) (sep 2018), IEEE, pp. 404--414.
[8]
Decan, A., Mens, T., and Grosjean, P. An Empirical Comparison of Dependency Network Evolution in Seven Software Packaging Ecosystems. Empirical Software Engineering 24, 1 (feb 2019), 381--416.
[9]
Figueroa, I. A Preliminary Assessment of how Monads are Used in Haskell. In Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages (New York, NY, USA, sep 2017), ACM, pp. 1--7.
[10]
Figueroa, I., Leger, P., and Fukuda, H. Which Monads Haskell Developers Use: An Exploratory Study. Science of Computer Programming 201 (2021), 102523.
[11]
Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., and Vlissides, J. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Professional Computing Series. Addison-Wesley, October 1994.
[12]
Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M., Sherwood, P., Robles, G., and Izquierdo, D. Technical lag in software compilations: Measuring how outdated a software deployment is. In Open Source Systems: Towards Robust Practices (Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2017), Springer International Publishing, pp. 182--192.
[13]
Hackage. A central package repository for Haskell, Sept. 2020. http://hackage.haskell.org. Last visited: 01/04/2021.
[14]
Haskell. The Haskell Language, Sept. 2020. http://www.haskell.org. Last visited: 01/04/2021.
[15]
haskell.org. Haskell Cabal, Apr. 2020. Last visited: 09/04/2021.
[16]
Hemmati, H., Nadi, S., Baysal, O., Kononenko, O., Wang, W., Holmes, R., and Godfrey, M. W. The MSR Cookbook: Mining a Decade of Research. In Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2013), MSR '13, IEEE Press, pp. 343--352.
[17]
Jaskelioff, M. Monatron: An Extensible Monad Transformer Library. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5836 (2011), 233--248.
[18]
Jones, M. P. Functional programming with overloading and higher-order polymorphism. In Advanced Functional Programming, First International Spring School on Advanced Functional Programming Techniques-Tutorial Text (Båstad, Sweden, May 1995), pp. 97--136.
[19]
Kikas, R., Gousios, G., Dumas, M., and Pfahl, D. Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks. In 2017 IEEE/ACM 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) (may 2017), IEEE, pp. 102--112.
[20]
Liang, S., Hudak, P., and Jones, M. Monad transformers and modular interpreters. pp. 333--343.
[21]
Matplotlib. Matplotlib: A Library for Creating Static, Animated, and Interactive Visualizations in Python, Apr. 2021. http://matplotlib.org. Last visited: 01/04/2021.
[22]
Moggi, E. Computational lambda-calculus and monads. University of Edinburgh, 1988.
[23]
Moggi, E. Notions of computation and monads. Information and Computation 93, 1 (1991), 55--92.
[24]
Morris, J. G. Experience Report: Using Hackage to Inform Language Design. In Proceedings of the Third ACM Haskell Symposium on Haskell (2010), Haskell '10, pp. 61--66.
[25]
npm. Build Amazing Things, Apr. 2021. https://www.npmjs.com. Last visited: 08/04/2021.
[26]
Pandas. A Fast, Powerful, Flexible and Easy to use Open Source Data Analysis and Manipulation Tool, Apr. 2021. https://pandas.pydata.org. Last visited: 09/04/2021.
[27]
Plakidas, K., Schall, D., and Zdun, U. Evolution of the R Software Ecosystem: Metrics, Relationships, and their Impact on Qualities. Journal of Systems and Software 132 (oct 2017), 119--146.
[28]
PYPI. Find, Install and Publish Python Packages with the Python Package Index, Apr. 2021. https://pypi.org. Last visited: 08/04/2021.
[29]
Scrapy. An Open Source and Collaborative Framework for Extracting the Data you need from Websites, Apr. 2020. https://www.scrapy.org. Last visited: 09/04/2021.
[30]
Stackage. Stackage: A Curated Repository for Stable Haskell Packages, Apr. Sept. https://www.stackage.org. Last visited: 01/04/2021.
[31]
Tarjan, R. Depth-First Search and Linear Graph Algorithms. SIAM journal on computing 1, 2 (1972), 146--160.
[32]
Wadler, P. Comprehending monads. In Proceedings of the 1990 ACM Conference on LISP and Functional Programming (Nice, France, June 1990), pp. 61--78.
[33]
Wadler, P. Monads for functional programming. In International School on Advanced Functional Programming (Båstad, Sweden, May 1995), pp. 24--52.
Index Terms
- Evolution of a haskell repository and its use of monads: an exploratory study of stackage
Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.
Recommendations
A preliminary assessment of how monads are used in Haskell
SBLP '17: Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Programming LanguagesMonads are a denotational approach to embed and reason about notions of computation such as mutable state, I/O, exceptions, and many others. Even though monads are technically language-agnostic, they are mostly associated to the Haskell language. Indeed,...
Making monads first-class with template haskell
Haskell '08: Proceedings of the first ACM SIGPLAN symposium on HaskellMonads as an organizing principle for programming and semantics are notoriously difficult to grasp, yet they are a central and powerful abstraction in Haskell. This paper introduces a domain-specific language, MonadLab, that simplifies the construction ...
Making monads first-class with template haskell
HASKELL '08Monads as an organizing principle for programming and semantics are notoriously difficult to grasp, yet they are a central and powerful abstraction in Haskell. This paper introduces a domain-specific language, MonadLab, that simplifies the construction ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
April 2022
2099 pages
ISBN:9781450387132
DOI:10.1145/3477314
- Conference Chairs:
- Jiman Hong,
- Miroslav Bures,
- Program Chairs:
- Juw Won Park,
- Tomas Cerny
Copyright © 2022 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 06 May 2022
Check for updates
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
SAC '22
Sponsor:
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 31Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)16
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Get Access
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in