Comment by xfer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xfer | Hacker News Reader

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I would say tooling is the main reason haskell is not adopted even in personal projects much. The package manager used to be pretty bad, poor editor support is still the biggest obstacle for new-comers. Combine that with the fact that students are taught a procedural-style language in their school and you have small percentage of new-comers looking at it. Rust have an advantage here since it is procedural-ish language.

But these problems require money and expertise and marketing from people who already are in the field, so a bit of chicken-egg problem.

Arrogance is the last thing i would say about haskell community and i have interacted with them on reddit and irc. So not sure about that.

The thing about ignoring enterprise needs is that the enterprises need to invest in the things they want. Those that do contribute are using haskell in enterprises that fit their needs. Otherwise it is primarily a research driven language.

It's not very surprising that Go/Java is doing very well, looking at the investment done by the companies behind it.

I think Haskell tooling is pretty good now. VSCode with the Haskell plugins is simple to setup. I used to use Emacs for Haskell, but the VSCode support is now so good that I just take the easy route.

Stack and stackage made package management much easier for me. I am an enthusiastic, but not great Haskell programmer so I like running the ‘hlint’ linter program for hints on improving my code.

My heart is really with Common Lisp, but Haskell is also a pleasure to use and the tooling seems much better to me than five years ago.

I think Haskell versioning is highly bifurcated.

You mean like SemVer vs the default whose name I can't remember?

I mean like installing and managing multiple versions of the compiler toolchain is painful.

I mean, it's all pretty well automated by stack, the only painful part is that it can take a long time and use a lot of storage.

Sure it's pretty well automated, but not a great experience.

Is there something about ghcup that doesn't do the job for you? You ask it to install a particular version of GHC and Cabal for you. It does it. Multiple versions can exist together. Job done.

https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/

the default is pvp [1] and I think most packages use that and not SemVer? or, at least, I can't remember off the top of my head of specifically pinning a package with SemVer.

[1] https://pvp.haskell.org/

I pick Haskell back up every few years for a new project or two, and it seems like I have to play whack a mole to figure out which editors actually work and can do something more interesting than syntax highlighting. It’s not uncommon for an editor to just stop working, which is usually when I start asking myself why I didn’t just go ahead and use Rails instead.

Is it so hard to find Leksah?

http://leksah.org/

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