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by _3sno 2100 days ago
I am a fan of Haskell, the biggest problem for me was installing stack/cabal. I eventually got there, but I recall it was a very painful and frustrating process. With that in mind I can advocate for it in good conscience. Managing ghc versions and creating/generating projects should made easy.

I think rust got this right, rustup and cargo are great tools that are easy to install and work with.

3 comments

I'm starting a (completely unofficial) project to understand the difficulties involved in getting started with Haskell. If you have the time and inclination I'd be much obliged if you would file a new issue explaining in more detail what points of pain and frustration you encountered: https://github.com/tomjaguarpaw/tilapia/issues/new
IMO the suggestion for anyone new to Haskell should be "just use Stack". It's easy to install, works out of the box.

Cabal has fixed the problems from a few years ago, and Nix is a nice ecosystem to plug into, but these can get in the way at the beginning, at a point where the goal is to "create my first project, write my first program, build it, test it, run it".

I hear you. I have made playing with Haskell much more enjoyable by doing two things: rely of stack and by have a fast multi core VPS so that long Haskell builds whenever I update to a new stack resolver version. I don’t do much Haskell on my laptops anymore.