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Comment by jdeaton | Hacker News Reader

I think its great that someone is trying to make haskell not suck to use. Better still that its very ambitious as it means people will learn much if or when it doesn't meet its aspirations.

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In my humble opinion (I'm still new to Haskell), the best way to do that is to contribute to existing Haskell tooling.

That's something I'm looking into doing myself. It would be great to help improve tools like cabal and the haskell-language-server.

I think that will go a long way towards making Haskell more beginner-friendly, and easier to use in production.

Yeah, but if they want to break compatibility with Haskell (GHC).. I think that's a significant drag, and I am very skeptical of that. I think Haskell's extension mechanism has shown that language can improve significantly without breaking changes. Furthermore, I don't see much in their goals which would require a departure from GHC compatibility, it's mostly about tooling.

In my mind ghc extensions are one of the biggest barrier to entry for learning haskell. Tutorials typically mention them a bit at the end but they have a huge impact on the language and are used by most libraries.

I think Stephen Diehl's What I wish I knew about Haskell is an excellent overview. (Although no longer maintained, I wish he continued with Haskell and drop his worries about crypto.)

Personally, I use ClassyPrelude and only a handful of extensions.

I see this comment a lot, but I don't understand why. I dove into Haskell and I didn't need to thoroughly understand each extension to be productive. Even the ones I turned on because a library asked me to.

Haskell already doesn't suck to use! And it's still improving. Cabal is really solid nowadays, for instance.

Yup Haskell is those kinda languages that you always wanna learn but then hit bumb when you actually try to do something more complex than monad tutorial with it. I will definitely test this if it is something like Haskell--.

Same. I wasn't aware of NeoHaskell before this little drama stint but now I'm quite excited to see how it pans out. I really love Haskell, and the push it needs is so small.

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