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Exactly. At this point I really wish the FP complete people would just fork GHC and get it over with. They've been such a huge problem in the haskell communit

Exactly. At this point I really wish the FP complete people would just fork GHC and get it over with. They've been such a huge problem in the haskell community, just divide it up already.

tinco 10y ago
A huge problem? Could you give an example of the sort of problem they are causing? Maybe I am out of the loop but from my perspective as a hobby coder FP complete (particularly snoyberg) has done nothing but put out extremely useful code. Most notable of which stack which is (going to be) the defacto standard for deploying Haskell applications.
- grp 10y ago
  Producing really good code doesn't give you the right to claim property of the userland (sort of). For me, it's a huge problem. Imagine if each companies (using haskell commercially) start to act like that...
  - tinco 10y ago
    What do you mean by claiming property of the userland?
- lallysingh 10y ago
  Stack is exactly that, and it's controlled by a private entity whose business model works better the more dependence their users have on their tools. FP complete isn't misbehaving, but they're putting themselves in a position to do a lot of damage if they did.
  - gelisam 10y ago
    I thought FP Complete had moved on from selling tools (like the online IDE they used to host) to being a Haskell consulting firm?
    - realmgsloan 10y ago
      Yup. Stack was born out of our internal build tool "fpbuild". We found that having a good build tool was crucial to our productivity. Stack was created to better satisfy our own needs, and we shared it with the community so that they can also benefit from it and help make it better. When someone's consistently had good contributions and discussion, we've granted them maintainer level privileges. Certainly quite a lot of stack's development and maintenance is done by FP Complete folks. However, our intention is to make the project as open to contribution and feedback as possible.
      - HaskellMuppet 10y ago
        You can't deny there's pattern emerging of reinventing existing Haskell infrastructure under the pretense to "move away from infrastructure that is showing its age" rather than help improving the existing one Moreover, this new tooling/services are operated and maintained by FPC employees which, quite conveniently, moves control away from the community board to FP Complete which by design has commercial interests at its heart. I'm not saying FP Complete is doing evil things right now but this creeping shift of powers into the hands of a commercial entity is making me uneasy.
  - codygman 10y ago
    > Stack is exactly that, and it's controlled by a private entity It's open source and the bug reports and feature requests merged in seem to indicate the aims have been making building Haskell projects easier. I don't see indications of vetos in favor of FP complete that hurt the Haskell community.
    - lallysingh 10y ago
      Stack isn't just a tool, it's also infrastructure to support that tool. I use it constantly, and like it, but let's not pretend there isn't a shift in power and influence as a result.
  - Silhouette 10y ago
    How strong is that dependency? I've set up a few things using Stack, but as far as I can see there's nothing that would stop me just downloading the intended versions of GHC and the various needed packages from Hackage if Stack went away tomorrow. Are other projects more tightly integrated in some way, such that backing out in the event of catastrophic failure of the Stack ecosystem would be unreasonably or prohibitively difficult?
    - lallysingh 10y ago
      Not terribly. You may be able to replace it with nix now.
- MustardTiger 10y ago
  Stack is a perfect example. The people involved have been the ones artificially creating the problem by refusing to follow established community standards (the package versioning policy), then they release a tool to "solve" the problem they created, all while spewing FUD about cabal and the actual haskell developers and community.
  - mcbuilder 10y ago
    It's not just people at FP Complete `et al` who were frustrated with cabal-install. Cabal-hell was the number one problem with using Haskell for commercial projects, as a majority of people responded who took part in a FP Complete Haskell organized survey (this was before stack was officially released), https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2015/05/thousand-user-haskell-survey https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2015/05/thousand-user-haskel.... I wrote that survey, if you want to discuss methodology I would be happy to. Anecdotally, after contacting by email most of the respondents, very few complained of a fragmentation the community by virtue of stack being released. We could argue all day over about arguments on reddit, but data suggests otherwise. FP Complete is a commercial consulting firm now targeting life science companies. We use Haskell because we believe it is the best modern language for robust high-performance software. It is not our goal to own the Haskell ecosystem. It is our goal to promote Haskell use and to develop reliable tooling. Do people feel the same way about continuum analytics for releasing Anaconda and special versions of numpy?
    - MustardTiger 10y ago
      That doesn't address what I said at all. People were not frustrated with cabal-install, they were frustrated with package installation errors, and blamed cabal-install and "cabal hell" (despite the vast majority of errors having nothing to do with cabal hell). But the actual problem is widely used packages written by FP complete people deliberately refusing to follow the PvP. Yesod was the biggest example, everyone complained about how impossible it was to install. We did not need a curated set of packages and a backwards package installation tool to solve that problem, we needed the yesod devs to follow the rules. This is exactly what I mean. You create a problem, spread FUD about the problem, then "solve" the problem by conveniently trying to move everyone to your separate ecosystem and tooling.

Exactly. At this point I really wish the FP complete people would just fork GHC and get it over with. They've been such a huge problem in the haskell community, just divide it up already.

tinco 10y ago

A huge problem? Could you give an example of the sort of problem they are causing? Maybe I am out of the loop but from my perspective as a hobby coder FP complete (particularly snoyberg) has done nothing but put out extremely useful code. Most notable of which stack which is (going to be) the defacto standard for deploying Haskell applications.

grp 10y ago
Producing really good code doesn't give you the right to claim property of the userland (sort of). For me, it's a huge problem. Imagine if each companies (using haskell commercially) start to act like that...
- tinco 10y ago
  What do you mean by claiming property of the userland?
lallysingh 10y ago
Stack is exactly that, and it's controlled by a private entity whose business model works better the more dependence their users have on their tools. FP complete isn't misbehaving, but they're putting themselves in a position to do a lot of damage if they did.
- gelisam 10y ago
  I thought FP Complete had moved on from selling tools (like the online IDE they used to host) to being a Haskell consulting firm?
  - realmgsloan 10y ago
    Yup. Stack was born out of our internal build tool "fpbuild". We found that having a good build tool was crucial to our productivity. Stack was created to better satisfy our own needs, and we shared it with the community so that they can also benefit from it and help make it better. When someone's consistently had good contributions and discussion, we've granted them maintainer level privileges. Certainly quite a lot of stack's development and maintenance is done by FP Complete folks. However, our intention is to make the project as open to contribution and feedback as possible.
    - HaskellMuppet 10y ago
      You can't deny there's pattern emerging of reinventing existing Haskell infrastructure under the pretense to "move away from infrastructure that is showing its age" rather than help improving the existing one Moreover, this new tooling/services are operated and maintained by FPC employees which, quite conveniently, moves control away from the community board to FP Complete which by design has commercial interests at its heart. I'm not saying FP Complete is doing evil things right now but this creeping shift of powers into the hands of a commercial entity is making me uneasy.
- codygman 10y ago
  > Stack is exactly that, and it's controlled by a private entity It's open source and the bug reports and feature requests merged in seem to indicate the aims have been making building Haskell projects easier. I don't see indications of vetos in favor of FP complete that hurt the Haskell community.
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    Stack isn't just a tool, it's also infrastructure to support that tool. I use it constantly, and like it, but let's not pretend there isn't a shift in power and influence as a result.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  How strong is that dependency? I've set up a few things using Stack, but as far as I can see there's nothing that would stop me just downloading the intended versions of GHC and the various needed packages from Hackage if Stack went away tomorrow. Are other projects more tightly integrated in some way, such that backing out in the event of catastrophic failure of the Stack ecosystem would be unreasonably or prohibitively difficult?
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    Not terribly. You may be able to replace it with nix now.
MustardTiger 10y ago
Stack is a perfect example. The people involved have been the ones artificially creating the problem by refusing to follow established community standards (the package versioning policy), then they release a tool to "solve" the problem they created, all while spewing FUD about cabal and the actual haskell developers and community.
- mcbuilder 10y ago
  It's not just people at FP Complete `et al` who were frustrated with cabal-install. Cabal-hell was the number one problem with using Haskell for commercial projects, as a majority of people responded who took part in a FP Complete Haskell organized survey (this was before stack was officially released), https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2015/05/thousand-user-haskell-survey https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2015/05/thousand-user-haskel.... I wrote that survey, if you want to discuss methodology I would be happy to. Anecdotally, after contacting by email most of the respondents, very few complained of a fragmentation the community by virtue of stack being released. We could argue all day over about arguments on reddit, but data suggests otherwise. FP Complete is a commercial consulting firm now targeting life science companies. We use Haskell because we believe it is the best modern language for robust high-performance software. It is not our goal to own the Haskell ecosystem. It is our goal to promote Haskell use and to develop reliable tooling. Do people feel the same way about continuum analytics for releasing Anaconda and special versions of numpy?
  - MustardTiger 10y ago
    That doesn't address what I said at all. People were not frustrated with cabal-install, they were frustrated with package installation errors, and blamed cabal-install and "cabal hell" (despite the vast majority of errors having nothing to do with cabal hell). But the actual problem is widely used packages written by FP complete people deliberately refusing to follow the PvP. Yesod was the biggest example, everyone complained about how impossible it was to install. We did not need a curated set of packages and a backwards package installation tool to solve that problem, we needed the yesod devs to follow the rules. This is exactly what I mean. You create a problem, spread FUD about the problem, then "solve" the problem by conveniently trying to move everyone to your separate ecosystem and tooling.