[berdario]

To be fair other languages need sandboxes as well: Virtualenv in Python and Bundler in Ruby fill the role

But in a language like Haskell, a sandbox is definitely a subpar solution (glacial compilation times and huge artifacts sizes inside ~/.cabal: 1GB on my machine, compared to the few hundred MB of my ~/.m2). Unless we find a way to bootstrap a sandbox from a vetted/trusted base one that contains things like Yesod (but vetting packages is a job better handled by stackage and/or nix ).

I use Nix, but I'm not comfortable yet in using it with Haskell... to try things quickly I'd need to whip up a nix-shell. But I'm more used to simply have easy access to a ghci repl at my fingertip. And if I install both things, I have to keep care at not trying to cabal install things onto the nix-installed ghc, nor to do the quick-and-dirty thing (go back to install things in ~/.cabal)

Something like lein-try [1] plus Nix might cover my use cases. But Stackage seems simpler and closer to the workflow most haskell developers are accustomed with (and it could be useful also for platforms that don't have Nix available)... if only it'd have more adoption

[1] https://github.com/rkneufeld/lein-try