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Comment by seagreen | Hacker News Reader

I switched from Python and Go to Haskell over the last year. Haskell takes much longer to compile than Go and cabal hell can really suck. Other than that it's been absolutely fantastic.

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I actually did the exact same thing a couple years ago.

> cabal hell can really suck

Agreed, prepare to be happy:

https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2015/01/announcing-lts-haske...

> Haskell takes much longer to compile than Go

Also agree, however -O0 in your .cabal file's ghc-options (when -fdevelopment is true) and using -j${NUM_CPU_CORES} can really help.

I think the existence of ghc-mod for incremental compiling and the interpreter repl really don't make compile times a big deal. It's a bigger issue in languages where you actually have to fully compile over and over as a part of your dev loop. This isn't something I ever do in Haskell because of said tools.

What kind of programs do you write?

For fun I'm attracted to various high-level information processing stuff and I do backend web dev at work. Haskell's definitely a Python replacement for me, I'm not writing any OSes in it.

Not the parent, but I made the same transition a couple of years ago. I emailed you something I've wrote in Haskell that might be relevant to you but didn't want to publicize too much yet.

Thank you very much! I'm right now hip deep in Erlang and I very much would like to have a better look at Haskell.

To ease your Haskell experience consider using LTS Haskell or Stackage to avoid Cabal hell:

https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2015/01/announcing-lts-haske... http://www.stackage.org/

Then you'll want to see also Cloud Haskell: http://haskell-distributed.github.io/

I'm not sure exactly what its current status is in terms of production-readiness but I believe it is still very active. The GitHub repos seem to be chugging along.

Thanks!

Not to bombard you with too much at once, but one interesting CloudHaskell-related extension that's landing in GHC 7.10 is Static Pointers: safe references to "static" code (constant values, functions, etc.) that can be passed between running instances of a program.

https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/guest-posts/2014-12-23-static-p...

Come along to http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/ if you like. We're quite friendly in there.

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