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by JadeNB 3949 days ago
I imagine that this is a naïve question, but it's sincere: what does this app offer for its $20 cost that the Haskell platform doesn't? Of their five big selling points, three don't seem really convincing: it mentions that it includes 200 libraries—more than HP, but not the sort of thing one needs to pay for; there is SpriteKit support, of which they say:

> We will release the SpriteKit binding under a permissive open source license for general use as soon as possible.

; and "Let the type system help you", which, of course, is just a feature of Haskell, not of this environment.

A drag'n'drop project manager is nice, but doesn't seem like that big a deal; so I guess that the real selling point is the "Immediate feedback". Indeed, that seems to be a huge selling point, and it's something for which I've often wished while coding Haskell. However, their blurb on it is very brief:

> Haskell playgrounds provide instant feedback, displaying types and results of computations, both textual and graphical.

Is there any way to read more about this, and, in particular, to evaluate how much value it adds before buying?

2 comments

The blog link on the website fleshes out the thinking a little further:

http://blog.haskellformac.com/blog/from-the-read-eval-print-...

The author also had a blog post on it here:

http://justtesting.org/post/103422773731/why-are-playgrounds...

Quoting /u/kamatsu (from reddit): "Some context. This is a very early version released by /u/chak in time for ICFP. There are lots more features planned, so don't view this as the final product."

Comparing it to HP doesn't really make sense; it's a very early stage IDE with some yet-unreleased libraries and Xcode-like features/interaction (see Playgrounds) by a known GHC/Haskell developer.

> Comparing it to HP doesn't really make sense

Indeed, I should have made it clear that I was looking for an appropriate comparison, not meaning to suggest that HP (which was just the first thing that came to mind) was an appropriate comparison. Thanks for the insight!