A technical vision for the Haskell ecosystem

(discourse.haskell.org)

43 points | by cosmic_quanta 1 hour ago

5 comments

  • pmkary 3 minutes ago
    There is this memo video of S. P. Jones that famously says "Haskell is Useless". I love Haskell, but I wished it was universal like C, C++, JavaScript, Rust, and C#. By that I mean: It could be used to create apps for desktop, mobile, and web. JavaScript can be used to do so many things like power the entire web, be on node and let anyone create cli and share the code with web, and mobile through React Native, on desktop with Electron and its alike things, it lets you do plugins for god knows how many things, it lets you write things for the GNOME Shell... C and C++ are perhaps behind everything in the world and string theory finally gets seen will see they are written in C. And they can be compiled to Web and almost everything in the world. Rust is a placeholder for the two, and C# reinvented itself when it saw Mono and now works even in the browser. Each time I see Haskell I wonder what else can I do rather than creating CLI apps, and it makes me choose something else that grants me more code reuse and interesting applications. If I could have a vision for Haskell, it was for it to be useful. Academic research and making compilers is cool, a few cli things here and there are cool too, but why can't we build music players and game engines and flutters and web pages with it? The language is way more elegant and beautiful than all the JS/C like languages out there and I really wished I could use it for the things I did...
  • _bent 19 minutes ago
    > the onboarding experience of rust

    > we are going to build the best onboarding experience in the programming language ecosystem

    > This can only be done if we commit to unix principles > write programs that do one thing and do it well

    Rust is so approachable because Cargo does not subscribe to "do one thing". In fact Cargo does a bunch of things. Which is very convenient for newcomers, because they only need to learn one thing instead of a bunch (and how they interact).

    The same holds for a GUI like a file explorer with buttons and interactions like drag / drop or marquee select, which is a bunch simpler than chaining 3 programs together to delete 30 old files and move some folder into a subdirectory.

    It also explains why the most successful tools within the land of Unix philosophy are stuff like AWK, which really don't just do one thing. Or why PowerShell is less usable than GNU. Or why Emacs is an 'operating system'.

    It's also a reason why the installation experience for Haskell is so bad: there are a bunch of programs and users don't know where to start and what they need.

    > Cabal and Stack: which one should I install? > We recommend installing both.

    One thing and one thing well.

    Atleast it seems they've added a combined installer for these tools since the last time I've checked.

  • origini 53 minutes ago
    Sooo they are fixing how you install Haskell? :D
    • rafaelRiv 30 minutes ago
      How this was ever a problem ? and today we have ghcup, stack and nix
      • itishappy 19 minutes ago
        That's the problem!

        If I'm on NixOS, should I be installing via ghcup, stack, or nix?

        • wasted_intel 14 minutes ago
          To be fair, that’s a general problem on NixOS (and other OSes), and one that tools like devenv have tried to solve. You can take what’s included with OS packages, but then you’re stuck with whatever version that is.
  • pandinus 33 minutes ago
    Haskell disciples just can't let it die. Years after years of irrelevance. I acknowledge that being mistreated by a fanatical Haskell professor/priest may have biased me against it.
  • semiinfinitely 38 minutes ago
    [flagged]