A technical vision for the Haskell ecosystem

(discourse.haskell.org)

38 points | by cosmic_quanta 1 hour ago

4 comments

  • _bent 14 minutes ago
    > the onboarding experience of rust

    > we are going to build the best onboarding experience in the programming language ecosystem

    > This can only be done if we commit to unix principles > write programs that do one thing and do it well

    Rust is so approachable because Cargo does not subscribe to "do one thing". In fact Cargo does a bunch of things. Which is very convenient for newcomers, because they only need to learn one thing instead of a bunch (and how they interact).

    The same holds for a GUI like a file explorer with buttons and interactions like drag / drop or marquee select, which is a bunch simpler than chaining 3 programs together to delete 30 old files and move some folder into a subdirectory.

    It also explains why the most successful tools within the land of Unix philosophy are stuff like AWK, which really don't just do one thing. Or why PowerShell is less usable than GNU. Or why Emacs is an 'operating system'.

    It's also a reason why the installation experience for Haskell is so bad: there are a bunch of programs and users don't know where to start and what they need.

    > Cabal and Stack: which one should I install? > We recommend installing both.

    One thing and one thing well.

    Atleast it seems they've added a combined installer for these tools since the last time I've checked.

  • origini 47 minutes ago
    Sooo they are fixing how you install Haskell? :D
    • rafaelRiv 25 minutes ago
      How this was ever a problem ? and today we have ghcup, stack and nix
      • itishappy 14 minutes ago
        That's the problem!

        If I'm on NixOS, should I be installing via ghcup, stack, or nix?

        • wasted_intel 8 minutes ago
          To be fair, that’s a general problem on NixOS (and other OSes), and one that tools like devenv have tried to solve. You can take what’s included with OS packages, but then you’re stuck with whatever version that is.
  • pandinus 28 minutes ago
    Haskell disciples just can't let it die. Years after years of irrelevance. I acknowledge that being mistreated by a fanatical Haskell professor/priest may have biased me against it.
  • semiinfinitely 33 minutes ago
    [flagged]