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The problem I have with Haskell for getting anything actually done is that nothing I try to do actually works. I mean in the basic "try out the tutorial to lear

The problem I have with Haskell for getting anything actually done is that nothing I try to do actually works. I mean in the basic "try out the tutorial to learn the thing and be able to get to the end without an error I don't have enough experience to debug" sense. Stack should help with this, but it doesn't when the versions you get (and function signatures of those versions) have changed since the docs were written. Cloud Haskell is an example of this: the tutorial docs are incomplete (the very first command they have you write is wrong, among other things), and they don't specify a stack version so the Hello World example doesn't build with the current snapshot and there's a really odd change to a public API I just can't get my head round. I've had the same experience with Yesod and Scotty too, although not recently - every time I decide it's been long enough for the ecosystem to mature a bit more, I bounce off issues like this which I just don't get elsewhere, and decide to give it another couple of years.

pdimitar 8y ago
Every time I see how many variants (and flags) the GHC has and I am like "feck no, I'll check it out again next year". But I think it's a culture thing in that community and it won't ever change. That's what one of the things that's kind of making me give up on OCaml as well although there things aren't that bad.
lame88 8y ago
I'm not familiar with Cloud Haskell, but I can attest that documentation and information availability in general have become a huge priority for me recently after getting burned by lack of it in recent years. This is actually very tricky to nail a sweet spot in, because it almost requires that a technology be currently popular, yet stable. There are long-lived Haskell libraries that have poor documentation and Haskell is rare enough that there aren't often answers to common pitfalls on StackOverflow etc. Ruby on Rails still has ongoing releases, but its popularity has declined and apparently so has its sources of community information beyond the official docs, which only cover so much. And then you have the immature, fast-moving JS ecosystem. Ironically for these reasons I could easily see myself choosing Java for projects in the near future; I don't like the language, but I've learned that the problems I have with Java are not my biggest problems as a professional engineer anymore.

pdimitar 8y ago

Every time I see how many variants (and flags) the GHC has and I am like "feck no, I'll check it out again next year". But I think it's a culture thing in that community and it won't ever change. That's what one of the things that's kind of making me give up on OCaml as well although there things aren't that bad.

lame88 8y ago

I'm not familiar with Cloud Haskell, but I can attest that documentation and information availability in general have become a huge priority for me recently after getting burned by lack of it in recent years. This is actually very tricky to nail a sweet spot in, because it almost requires that a technology be currently popular, yet stable. There are long-lived Haskell libraries that have poor documentation and Haskell is rare enough that there aren't often answers to common pitfalls on StackOverflow etc. Ruby on Rails still has ongoing releases, but its popularity has declined and apparently so has its sources of community information beyond the official docs, which only cover so much. And then you have the immature, fast-moving JS ecosystem. Ironically for these reasons I could easily see myself choosing Java for projects in the near future; I don't like the language, but I've learned that the problems I have with Java are not my biggest problems as a professional engineer anymore.