Report of first experience with the Haskell ecosystem.

[kindaro]

I want to put that here because I think it is a honest expression of actual experience and I think we need that to see the direction where improvement is needed.

See post. A short quote:

So... I've been toying a lot with Haskell lately.

But I feel a bit schizophrenic about my first impressions. There is something both very right, and very wrong about it.

While addressing most of my top concerns about other languages, and giving me hope to discover a language that I could love, the Haskell ecosystem seems in the meantime broken where I expected it the least to be. It is sooo frustrating, and leaves a bitter taste of unachievement :(

See also comments on Reddit. Some quotes:

Yea I think it just comes down to the stack/cabal situation is very bad and some kind of scorched earth approach is required.

Tried many times to get into Haskell, I really want to, but I get the same problems as you.

[tomjaguarpaw]

Thanks for filing this on Tilapia! Posts like this are exactly what we need to understand the new user experience.

One commenter on the Reddit thread made a great suggestion that I have filed as https://github.com/tomjaguarpaw/tilapia/issues/59.

I'll make some short notes on the article itself and then maybe flesh them out a bit more later.

• Frustration 1 and 2: Stack configuration and error messages

  I don't use Stack so I don't think I can helpfully comment. Cabal has some of the same problems though.

• Frustration 3: Maintainers?

  Or most packages are just abandonned, even sometimes left in a state that is no longer compatible with newer versions of the GHC, with nobody left to answer 3 years old issues and pull requests?

  I'm very much in favour of clearly marking deprecated or abandoned packages as such (see, for example, https://github.com/agrafix/Spock/issues/164#issuecomment-741578104). In fact I would go further and say that all packages whose authors recommend them for production use should clearly state what their mantainance guarantees are. It doesn't have to be onerous; even "I guarantee to respond to your query within five working days, with the exception of my personal holidays which will be clearly indicated.".

• Frustration 4 - Documentawhat?

  Well indeed. One of the aims of Tilapia is to tackle that.

[oguimbal]

Hi, that's quite nice to see that people are actually concerned about a random persons rants😀 And trying to do something about it.

One thing that I've learned with this blog post is that the Haskell comunity does care, which I did not expect, given its reputation.

[sullyj3]

I definitely remember being super confused by the difference between stack.yaml and package.yaml a few years ago. I only fairly recently even discovered the existence of hpack, and that that is why there are separate files. I'm still not fully clear on how they interact, or what it would mean to use stack without hpack or vice versa.