Hacker News Reader

Comment by wuschel | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, it is comparatively more difficult to get started in Haskell then, say, Python, Go, or even Rust (the latter has a steep learning curve after getting started, but installing and configuring the development environment is easy). Also, it is difficult to find a central source of information in Haskell.

I tried to give the language a spin, and struggled with many a barrier to get to the point where I see significant progress (books, build tools)

I understand that you are invested in the Haskell ecosystem with your company, and I am happy that the language has more adoption in the business sector. The design space of Haskell is huge, however, and then on boarding process to make serious applications is not convenient at all.

View on HN

You need to check out IHP. It's a new truly batteries-included web framework for haskell. IHP allows you to get started in minutes. It takes care of all the infrastructure work so you can just build cool stuff and enjoy the type-safety.

https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/

Disclaimer: Founder of digitally induced, the company that makes IHP :)

You are doing that a lot recently, so a disclaimer would be nice (that you built it and also run a dev business around it).

Not that IHP is bad (the batteries included approach for sure is a good idea), it just feels a little bit disingenuous otherwise.

Thanks for pointing out, added the disclaimer

Wonderful product. Looked at it a few weeks ago. I particularly like the video and how you are helping people understand the product. Congratulations!

I don’t disagree with that, though it’s much easier to get started today than it was five years ago. The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t think the solution to the problem of not making what feels like meaningful progress over the course of a few years is to only dabble with self-contained puzzle exercises. It’s certainly helpful, but there’s no substitute for just building a complete thing, provided you can get through initial on-boarding as you’ve highlighted.

> there’s no substitute for just building a complete thing, provided you can get through initial on-boarding as you’ve highlighted.

I think you are correct. Would you perhaps have some resources at hand that would combine on boarding with a simple Web project?

I think the Yesod book[0] is quite good, and it's free to read online.

[0]: https://www.yesodweb.com/book

The tooling certainly has the reputation of being hard to use. Go and Rust certainly have this nailed down better (having used Go on a daily basis for the past 5 years).

On the other hand, there's nothing magical about compiling a file with GHC, just like compiling with gcc. So a simple Makefile might suffice in a lot of cases (like doing AoC challenges).

Things start to get more complicated when you add Cabal (and Stack) into the mix, but even with just Cabal you get a lot of added benefits which not too much added complexity.

Things like IHP go one step further and go all-in on using nix. I've looked at using nix for a few hours and decided it is - right now - not worth the effort of actually learning it. Nothing to prevent me from using it to build something with IHP though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com