Less text on download page

[ndmitchell]

The current download page has a lot of stuff on it. In addition, one of the two top links is a link within the page, the other is a different page, which is highly confusing. I would suggest:

• Make the page short.
• Only have choices users can answer, specifically "what OS am I using", and even then, guess sensibly.

So the page should roughly read:

• To develop Haskell you need a Haskell compiler and a packaging system. The Stack packaging system can install the GHC Haskell compiler, so the easiest way to get started is:
• Download stack for Windows, Linux, Mac.
• Place stack on your PATH.
• Type stack setup.
• You now have a working Haskell setup, continue with:
  • stack ghci to enter the GHC interactive interpretter
  • stack install pandoc to install a Haskell program, such as pandoc
  • git clone url_of_prog && cd prog && stack build to start developing a library.

Then below that I'd have sections on what GHC is and how to get it independently (MinGHC), What Cabal is, and what the Platform is.

[snoyberg]

You've described my ideal page. And this is something that can (and hopefully will) go on a more opinionated landing page. The problem is that there's deadlock already on the haskell.org downloads page, and the general consensus seems to be "add more text so that users can make an informed decision." I'd much rather just make a decision for Stack, but then again the HP people wanted to just make the entire downloads page about HP, so short of getting the committee to actually admit that Stack has majority mindshare, a page like this won't fly.

These are the kinds of things, though, that we can add to the Stack installation guide, and to other future pages (pinging @bitemyapp).

[ndmitchell]

Given we have exactly the same ideas, I'll leave it to you to fight this battle :). I think it's important not to give beginners lots of information, no way to process it, and then hope they guess the right result (I suspect they will, but sadly the only sane thing to do there is run away and go try Rust).

[bitemyapp]

I agree with @ndmitchell about information overload.

I don't think adding more text will do anything useful because in order for them to make an informed decision, they wouldn't need just the benefits and caveats of each method, but they'd also need to know how frequently inconveniences would occur for them with each install method. That's hard to know without first-hand experience or experience helping others. Currently, HP issues are less frequent because it was updated. That'll get worse soon (next 3-6 months is my guess) and we'll be in another globally-installed-packages Hell cycle until they do another release. The problems will remain and get worse for those that haven't upgraded and HP has no real story for upgrading.

I have plans for resources for Stack, I just haven't had time yet because the current book cycle (we release every 15th) has been busy. Site is in same limbo but I'm looking to do that soon.