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> I am making a conjecture here but from my limited but nontrivial experience it seems libraries in the applications ecosystem of haskell apply the most advanced features they know of to solve their problems.

Apologies to others for the “me too” reply, but I wanted to let you know you aren’t alone, I also feel this way. It’s intellectual masturbation (without any reward/benefit), IMHO.

Haskell is a funny beast because I get a lot of joy from “conquering” the next level up (like a game) but in terms of productivity I’m not getting a lot done. OTOH in more pedestrian languages I’m using that brain BHP on getting stuff done. I really got into the Haskell thing a while back, going to meetups etc. but getting a job using Haskell is hard unless you’ve got experience already and want to take a pay cut.

Agreed - it certainly is rewarding in itself to get to the next level, but that's precisely it: the means become ends in themselves. I stopped using stuff like Arch Linux a while back for similar reasons.

Yep. Tools like Docker and Kubernetes on the other hand, I have found they give you a nice amount of leverage for much easier to understand concepts. In a similar "Workhorse" category I would put Git and Typescript. All of these require some effort to get to know, but they pay off nicely in terms of productivity.

Haskell is a pretty decent general purpose programming language, and if used well you can produce nice programs, but the problem is that the library you need will use some clever type system stuff and suddenly you are spending hours trying to understand how it all works.

For example I'd be happy doing a lot of stuff in the IO monad with some pure bits to the side where needed. Avoid the free monads, monad transformers, type classes and all that jazz. So use it like an imperative language for the most part.

The problem I have with Haskell for getting anything actually done is that nothing I try to do actually works. I mean in the basic "try out the tutorial to learn the thing and be able to get to the end without an error I don't have enough experience to debug" sense. Stack should help with this, but it doesn't when the versions you get (and function signatures of those versions) have changed since the docs were written. Cloud Haskell is an example of this: the tutorial docs are incomplete (the very first command they have you write is wrong, among other things), and they don't specify a stack version so the Hello World example doesn't build with the current snapshot and there's a really odd change to a public API I just can't get my head round.

I've had the same experience with Yesod and Scotty too, although not recently - every time I decide it's been long enough for the ecosystem to mature a bit more, I bounce off issues like this which I just don't get elsewhere, and decide to give it another couple of years.

I'm not familiar with Cloud Haskell, but I can attest that documentation and information availability in general have become a huge priority for me recently after getting burned by lack of it in recent years. This is actually very tricky to nail a sweet spot in, because it almost requires that a technology be currently popular, yet stable. There are long-lived Haskell libraries that have poor documentation and Haskell is rare enough that there aren't often answers to common pitfalls on StackOverflow etc. Ruby on Rails still has ongoing releases, but its popularity has declined and apparently so has its sources of community information beyond the official docs, which only cover so much. And then you have the immature, fast-moving JS ecosystem. Ironically for these reasons I could easily see myself choosing Java for projects in the near future; I don't like the language, but I've learned that the problems I have with Java are not my biggest problems as a professional engineer anymore.

Every time I see how many variants (and flags) the GHC has and I am like "feck no, I'll check it out again next year". But I think it's a culture thing in that community and it won't ever change.

That's what one of the things that's kind of making me give up on OCaml as well although there things aren't that bad.

Thank you for the input. Maybe I will never get to the point where I can comfortably make a web app, but learning the language has been a fun experience so far. I've heard good things about Scala and Akka.