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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

That just reads as:

"You are already smart enough to write Haskell"... if you accept that you are too dumb for most of Haskell and are therefore okay with being cut off from most of its ecosystem.

Digging into a dependency due to a bug or custom feature is something that usually happens on any bigger project of mine. If I have to expect that I won't be able to work in a dependencies codebase because it will most likely contain (multiple) concepts that I won't be able to understand, then that's a big no-no.

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I have only done Haskell during college and my friend is doing Haskell in web backend in production so I'd say I have a pretty good feeling about the skill gap in Haskell. There are many concepts that he tries to explain to me which I don't get 100% but it really does feel like all I need is more time. It was like that at first with monads and then phantom types, row types, hkt etc. I'd say the biggest detractor for people is that it takes more than 1 blog post and 1 hobby project to comprehend everything. It may take 1-2 years to learn all the concepts. To me the beautiful thing is that the concepts learned aren't some language quirks but instead general programming/math concepts which you simply cannot think about in simpler languages like C#. With all that, I'm still heavily put off from Haskell by all the tooling and I just can't let go of the comfort of working in Visual Studio. In 10 years I hope either C# gets some of my favorite things from Haskell like HKT and better inferrence or Haskell gets better tooling and broader ecosystem. My bet is on the former but gafter keeps postponing HKTs spec after spec.

If you feel like messing around with Haskell again for an afternoon then install VSCode with ghcide (and a syntax highlighting plugin ofc). You might get surprised ;)

Are you using that? Doing Haskell on vscode has been a painful experience for me.

Yep, all my team has switched to VSCode+ghcide and so far we're in love with it. Mind you ghcide is brand new, so this luxury of having a 21st century Haskell IDE did not exists even just a few months ago. Before we used ghcid with whichever editor (eg. Vim/Emacs/VSCode).

Have you written up a blog post about this? I think it would be really useful!

Thanks, I'll switch to it now based on your recommendation. Desperately want a decent Haskell editing setup, the bad tooling is killing my productivity and making me consider quitting Haskell.

Edit: Ok so I tried it. Template Haskell seems to break it, which my projects use heavily. And does not even report syntax errors in some files. Seems like yet another dead end for me as an editor setup, unfortunately.

Ah yes TH. That’s imho the last biggie in the way of total awesomeness. See this ticket: https://github.com/digital-asset/ghcide/issues/34

Got it, I'll keep an eye on this. Thanks for this recommendation!

Agreed! For years I used Emacs with various Haskell tools, but after I tried VSCODE and ghcide, that is almost all I use anymore.

most people drive cars, and yet have very little understanding of how it actually works internally. As long as the interfaces are well designed, this works fine for most.

I say the same is for haskell.

That's fine if you use your car for commuting (= casual projects with no special requirements) but not if you want to compete on the race track.

Of course you can optimally keep out of the dependencies, and a lot of people don't even think about digging into them and unnecessary limit themselves, but as I said in my initial comment, every bigger project I worked on involved tweaking dependencies in one way or another.

To run with your analogy — which I don't find particularly constructive anyway — people who are just starting to drive don't start by competing on the race track.

With no prior experience with lisp, I was able to get comfortable in a clojure-only codebase in less than 3 months.

That’s great. Not sure what point you’re making though :)

I'd say rally driving is the best analogy. Not only do you have to drive the car at peak performance, you also have to perform ad hoc repairs halfway through a stage

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