Comment by tieTYT | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tieTYT | Hacker News Reader

> The feeling of powerlessness one has when Cabal does not do what one wanted and one does not know how to fix it.

I experienced this immediately after I read Learn You A Haskell and it made me give up on the language. I develop on Windows (currently?) and I was passionate about creating my first hobby project in Haskell. But every direction I turned, I ran into an issue where a dependency or transitive dependency expected some linux library to be there and I couldn't install.

Maybe I'm just spoiled and need to be more open minded. I come from Java-land where I take "write once run anywhere" for granted. I eventually switched to Clojure but that was unsatisfying for different reasons. I wish there was a language with Haskell's purity and type system but Java's ability to "write once and run anywhere".

I think Frege is very close, but I feel uncomfortable learning something with such a small community (damn... I am spoiled).

>I develop on Windows

In my experience, this sucks in basically any language.

Well, I think I agree with you, but that wasn't the GP's point. The point was not that developing on Windows was bad, but that Haskell package management was bad on Windows. The GP was not yet running into the problems that you're referring to.

Then your experience is rather limited.

As a counter-anecdote, my experience is that Windows is frictionless for developing PHP, Node.JS, C#, Java, Scala, Elixir/Erlang. It's also close-to-first-class for Python. Ruby to a lesser extent, with a lot of the community just assuming you're on OSX, period.

I've often been impressed by how, despite the hacky nature of the Node.JS community, a lot of stuff simply just works there. For example, getting PhantomJS, a full-fledged scriptable headless browser, available for a project is a single "npm install" away on all three major OSes.

That is definitely impressive of the Node.js community! Good on them. Also great to know Elixir is working well on Windows, yet another feather in its increasingly-well-plumed hat!

I remember a get-Windows-working-better rallying call at a Ruby conference I was at 4 years ago, and as far as I can tell, things have not changed much since then. The OSX thing isn't quite fair though - everything works on linux too, because that's what people deploy on. In fact the trend seems to be toward developing against containers running your production version of linux, rather than OSX directly.

Funnily, one of the main reasons I switched to Linux was because writing Python on Windows was like hell. I couldn't get pip installed, and packages were an absolute pain to install.

What kind of development environment do you use (I'm particularly interested about Node and Elixir)?

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