Hackage, Haskell’s central library achive site, went live 2 years ago during the 2007 Haskell Hackathon in Oxford.

Here we are two years later, on the verge of 1000 open source Haskell applications, libraries and tools (993 at the time of writing), all swinging around cabal and cabal-install.

Is the Haskell community getting any better at the production of code? To work this out, I made a 28 day sliding average of the daily releases to Hackage, and there’s a clear upwards trend. More people are releasing more Haskell than ever before:

The two spikes correspond to the yearly GHC major releases, where a whole suite of libraries get updated.

We can break Hackage down by category too, to see what areas Haskell is being used in:

Half of all libraries (just over 500) are devoted to data structures, text handling and parsing, system interactions, control structures and abstractions, graphics, and development tools. Nothing terribly category-theoretic there :-)

Following closely are network, web, math, sound and database programming. (Breakdown of the top 30 categories).

The release of new code also mirrors the growth in community participation. Here, the growth in the Haskell IRC channel over the last 7 years:

It seems we’re seeing an obvious correlation between community input (new programmers) and output (project releases).

Join in: the lambdas are hot!