Environment setup has been heavily discussed[1] in the community and is definitely a pain point when getting started with Haskell. Unfortunately there are sever

Environment setup has been heavily discussed[1] in the community and is definitely a pain point when getting started with Haskell. Unfortunately there are several sides with differing opinions on how to bootstrap a user and get them using Haskell, although the new Downloads page seems to be a good first step towards achieving a more unified goal. The opinions kind of break down as: 1. Simply get GHC on their machine - Typically academic instructors trying to get their students started with low overhead. They simply want GHC and GHCi available so an assignment can compile, or code can be tested in the repl. 2. Install Haskell Platform - This has been strongly supported by what I would call the older Haskell community, although admittedly share your confusion as to its point. This seems to target point-and-click users and give them every tool in the ecosystem so that when they reference the random blogs/documentation out there they aren't confused by missing a command. 3. Use Stack - This has been heavily pushed by people trying to help Haskell grow in the programming industry. It's a fantastic tool and I recommend everyone use it if they plan on doing complex projects, especially in a team setting. My hope is that over the next year or so we'll see more stack adoption, ideally because there are more consistent tutorials/guides/documentation published which target it as the basic tool to start developing Haskell in. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/50prvg/haskellcommunity_next_steps_in_downloads_page/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/50prvg/haskellcomm...