[rlpb]

> I find it surprising that, despite the Haskell community's claims that Haskell is great for writing domain-specific languages, xmonad does not expose a DSL for you to configure it with.

I presume it's nice that you can actually customize xmonad with code. So an appropriate DSL would be a programming language so using Haskell makes sense. Any other DSL would be more limiting.

> If you want your config to use a Haskell package that's not provided by your distro, as many of the config examples do, you're out of luck unless you want to take the cabal route.

I can understand that this would cause pain. I suppose it's up to cabal and/or distros to fix this.

[sevensor]

> I presume it's nice that you can actually customize xmonad with code. So an appropriate DSL would be a programming language so using Haskell makes sense. Any other DSL would be more limiting.

You've hit the nail on the head here --- the problem is that xmonad offers an unlimited scope for configuration, including extensions to the behavior of xmonad. I'd rather see a clear separation between mechanisms for configuration and extension, even if that reduces the power of configuration.