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Comment by trymas | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see some demo version, as 20€ is a bit too much to drop.

Looks cool, lots of inspiration from swift playgrounds. Though, aren't there any open source alternatives (I have never tried haskell), probably similar to ipython (jupyter) stack?

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I know this is a statement of where the market is going, but boy is it depressing to see people saying that 20 Euros is too much to drop on a piece of software.

I don't think trymas was suggesting that €20 is too much to pay for a piece of software, but that it is too much to pay for software that you have not been able to evaluate at all first.

As far as I can tell, it isn't feature complete yet. I've got no problem spending €20 on this but I'm not really up for paying €20 so I can be a beta tester.

<rant> Sorry, but we are not living in US or well developed European country (Austria, Switzerland, Norway..). In one workday I make ~40€ after taxes and it's almost twice the average and almost thrice the minimum salary were I live. I would've not said a word if I would've been making >50,000 € a year, like in mentioned countries.

Dropping half of my days work on a software, which has limited capabilities, unknown reviews, is closed source (even though is basically bundled open source tools in, I suppose, comfortable package), and can cause some extra bugs from it self. Give me ol' good 14 day trial, or I will not pay blindly. </rant>

Perhaps IHaskell (https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell) is what you're looking for? It seems to be available on Jupyter's demo website.

I'm a heavy iPython user and thought iHaskell would be a good way to try out the language on my Mac. Unfortunately I just wound up in Cabal Hell. I spent a few hours tracking down broken dependencies on GitHub before giving up.

This project looks exciting because it lets you get started with a working distribution. I'm happy to pay for the privilege of ignoring the mess until the language has proven itself to me.

Try installing IHaskell with `stack`. `stack` is fairly new but it's solved all my `cabal` hell related problems. I put IHaskell in Stackage recently so you should just need to install stack, `stack install ihaskell` using a recent Stackage nightly resolver, and then `stack exec -- jupyter notebook` to start. Alternatively just `git clone` and run `stack install` from the resulting directory. If you end up trying it again but still encounter issues please file issues for me on Github so I can help!

Yes, I totally understand the desire to try the app first. For the launch version, we had no choice, but to go with the Mac App Store.

I have started to investigate alternative distribution channels (which then would allow trials, too), but that will take a while to implement (so, I can't promise anything concrete at the moment).

And let's not forget GHCi, which you get when you install Glasgow Haskell Compiler. It's a REPL and one of the best ways to play with Haskell.

At https://www.haskell.org/, you can try Haskell in the browser. You can also find binary distributions here.

Also, this book is supposed to be a good intro to Haskell: http://learnyouahaskell.com/

Take a look at IHaskell -- it's a kernel for Jupyter for Haskell.

If you'd like to just take a look, go to try.jupyter.org and select the "Welcome to Haskell" notebook!

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