[throwaway81523]

> despite Haskell being ~31 years old.

Tbf I think things are worse now than a few years ago because of the explosion of new Haskell code, plus the resulting several somewhat conflicting re-imaginings of the tooling to deal the increased complexity of juggling the now-huge code corpus. Stack, the original cabal, the current different cabal, Haskell Platform, etc. I like to think the vigorous activity in this area is not entirely unhealthy, since it is about identifying and attacking real problems. But, for those of us not in the middle of it and just want something that works, it is somewhat painful.

Tome, I can write up some issues and email them to you, but basically we need a better out-of-box experience. "stack ghci" takes so long to start up on an HDD server (tons of stuff getting paged in) that I keep thinking it has simply hung, while the old ghci was nowhere near that slow. Emacs Haskell mode goes into some crazy error loop if you try to use a ghci subprocess window (that used to work great). Haskell Platform (a blessed set of packages, more or less) was a good idea in principle but I think it became unmanageable and stopped being maintained.

I haven't done anything with Haskell in a while and this kind of thing is the main obstacle. Command-line ghc (ok, stack ghc) still works so it is still possible to compile stuff less conveniently when required. Mostly though, I just use other languages. If I were using Haskell for daily work then I could probably reach some reasonable tooling setup with enough effort, but as an occasional user it just hasn't been worth it.