I could go on and write you novels about it, and if someone really wants to know I can provide a massively detailed, exhaustive list with logs, screenshots, Github issues, etc.
But sweet jesus, you'd think in 2021 a basic tenet of a language would be:
"I want autocomplete + hover-docs to work on a project which has +50 dependency libraries and several hundred files."
The language may be the best thing since sliced bread, but the tooling/ecosystem and authorship process is absolutely the worst thing I've ever touched.
Here's a particularly funny one:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/26604994/139553801...
Even "experimental" languages like Nim and Zig had a more reliable and easier to use tooling and IDE integration than Haskell did (for me), despite Haskell being ~31 years old.
Hello, yes, I really want to know! I am on the board of the Haskell Foundation and improving developer tooling is likely to be one of our focus points in the near future. User experience reports will help us make progress. My email address is in my profile (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tome).
Tbf I think things are worse now than a few years ago because of the explosion of new Haskell code, plus the resulting several somewhat conflicting re-imaginings of the tooling to deal the increased complexity of juggling the now-huge code corpus. Stack, the original cabal, the current different cabal, Haskell Platform, etc. I like to think the vigorous activity in this area is not entirely unhealthy, since it is about identifying and attacking real problems. But, for those of us not in the middle of it and just want something that works, it is somewhat painful.
Tome, I can write up some issues and email them to you, but basically we need a better out-of-box experience. "stack ghci" takes so long to start up on an HDD server (tons of stuff getting paged in) that I keep thinking it has simply hung, while the old ghci was nowhere near that slow. Emacs Haskell mode goes into some crazy error loop if you try to use a ghci subprocess window (that used to work great). Haskell Platform (a blessed set of packages, more or less) was a good idea in principle but I think it became unmanageable and stopped being maintained.
I haven't done anything with Haskell in a while and this kind of thing is the main obstacle. Command-line ghc (ok, stack ghc) still works so it is still possible to compile stuff less conveniently when required. Mostly though, I just use other languages. If I were using Haskell for daily work then I could probably reach some reasonable tooling setup with enough effort, but as an occasional user it just hasn't been worth it.
> Not sure why you'd take that attitude though, really not a great way to get across whatever point you think you have
I guess to fail to understand how if the language is as fantastic as it's made out to be, why there's no equivalent to rust-analyzer or Eclipse jdt.ls and it can't build my company's 50MB binary in less than half an hour. And why is this state of affairs tolerated for decades?
Pascal/Delphi had an IDE and Dev UX that, according to programmers old enough to have used it, surpasses the productivity of most modern tools. And it is capable of compiling a billion lines of code in a couple of minutes.
https://www.fmxexpress.com/ryzen-9-5950x-one-billion-lines-o...
So what is up with Haskell?
"Ymmv I guess" isn't what I would call a sound approach to core language tooling.
> other than that you can rant.
Unless someone wants to. Then I can dump a wall of particular things that are broken.
See: "and if someone really wants to know I can provide a massively detailed, exhaustive list with logs, screenshots, Github issues, etc."