Tintin – A soft documentation website generator for Haskell | Hacker News Reader

Tintin – A soft documentation website generator for Haskell

theam.github.io

41 pointsNickSeagull16 comments

I started learning Haskell a few months ago and am currently going through the later chapters of Haskell from first principle. A major hurdle when it comes to libraries like quick check or Trifecta (the topic of the current chapter) is precisely what is alluded to in the readme for Tintin: type signatures are probably totally fine for experts, but for someone still relatively new to programming and especially new to Haskell they are kind of the 2nd step. The first one is just figuring out where to start and what are the typical use cases for the library. Which type signatures should I even be looking at first, what is typically used together,and so forth.

If more Haskell libraries had just a bit of soft documentation at least I would be extremely happy about that. It's pretty much my major hurdle when it comes to Haskell. The syntax I not only got used to, but really love now. The concepts that are taught are just complicated. Frankly monads expressed in my primary language, Javascript, are even harder to understand because of all the syntax noise. But the one thing that at least personally consider needlessly complicated is the lack of beginner friendly documentation.

Thanks for the comment! I felt like you when I started with Haskell, and I hope Tintin brings more newbie-friendly docs.

Wow I didn't realize Haskell beginners would learn to use Trifecta. Megaparsec is much more beginner friendly (and expert-friendly too). It has tutorials that guide you gently through the process of writing a parser. See https://markkarpov.com/megaparsec/parsing-simple-imperative-...

Fair warning: doesn't work at all with JS disabled or disabled for cross-origin (which is somewhat sad, especially for tech documentation).

We are in the process of fixing it, see https://github.com/theam/tintin/issues/7

Fixed in the last version

I'd just like to point out, in case OP hasn't already considered it, that TinTin++ is one of the most popular MUD clients (not that MUDs are particularly popular these days).

>not that MUDs are particularly popular these days

There's no good reason for that though. Shameless plug: http://icesus.org (we need players :-/)

Probably shouldn't be upvoting this as it doesn't have much to do with the topic, but I will anyway cause you're fighting for a lost art worth saving.

The site theme could use a bunch more contrast.

In the docs sidebar, I can literally not read the section names until I hover, and then squint some.

Haddock documentation tends to be fairly inscrutable at first glance, so I'm in favour of anyone trying to remedy that.

On the other hand the Haddock aesthetic and simplicity is awesome, whereas I find the Tintin website nauseating.

Just in case anyone missed it, tintin is a quintessential European comic character and its adventures with his dog milou and his friend captain haddock. See : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin

I'm with you on both counts. I mean, look at those shades of colour on the sidebar to the left: https://theam.github.io/tintin/01-getting-started.html Give me something concise (and designed for desktop: small fonts, small buttons).

Fixed contrasts.

I'm a big fan of fssnip. http://www.fssnip.net/u/title/Pipeline-list-processing

Hover over the lines and you get type information right there. One of the cool features of F# that I wish was present when reading docs in other languages.

Oh wow, that's great!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com