[Haskell-cafe] Poor first impression

Fernando Cassia fcassia at gmail.com
Fri Apr 27 05:28:48 EDT 2007


I admit in shame never having heard about Haskell before. I know about PHP,
Python, IBM' s REXX, TCL, TCL/TK, perl... but Haskell, never.

So, here's how I landed in Haskell-land: I was looking for a simple
ncurses-based text mode mp3 player with some sort of basic GUI and found
"HMP3" written in, you guessed it, Haskell.

So I follow the directions and download the huge 30MB+
ghc-6.6.1-i386-unknown-linux.tar.bz2. Bunzip2 it. tar xvf it. ./configure
and "make install". So far, so good.
and I get the following message, supposedly telling me that the haskell
compiler was installed OK...
=======================================================================
Installation of ghc-6.6.1 was successful.

To use, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH.

For documentation, see /usr/local/share/ghc-6.6.1/html/index.html
=======================================================================
(/usr/local/bin is already in my path)

So I decide to call the ghc compiler with no arguments to see if it was
indeed installed, and I get this:

[root at localhost ghc-6.6.1]# ghc
/usr/local/lib/ghc-6.6.1/ghc-6.6.1: error while loading shared libraries:
libreadline.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
#

So, I conclude that Haskell is not ready for prime time, if it cannot
install itself correclty including shared libs in a standard Fedora Core 6
system.

Goodbye Haskell, I just wanted to compile a MP3 player, and perhaps if the
compiler installed OK with no issues, I'd have taken a look at the language.
But as of right now, I don't have time to waste with broken compiler
installers.

Byebye
FC
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