Hi,<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2012/2/14 Doug McIlroy <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:doug@cs.dartmouth.edu">doug@cs.dartmouth.edu</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Kevin Jardine notices "the full Haskell ecosystem ... is huge", and<br>
laments the absence of "a sophisticated IDE to help manage" it.<br>
Being a small-code type, I don't personally enjoy IDE's, which<br>
are undeniably useful in big projects, at the cost of a whole lot<br>
more to learn about "programmering" in addition to programming.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>There are now several IDEs (or development environments) that you may use for Haskell programming: I personally work on EclipseFP (so the environment is quite similar to Java), but there is also Leksah. I've seen people making incredible things using Emacs and the Haskell modes, so I think there is now quite nice support for Haskell programming.</div>
<div>Apart from that, Haskell Platform and cabal makes it easy to use Haskell (at least as easy as PHP if you are using any of the LAMP packages in Windows, or Perl or Python).</div><div><br></div><div>(Disclaimer: I'm currently one of the developers of EclipseFP)</div>
<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
Nevertheless, I share Jardine's concern about the central problem.<br>
It is hard to find one's way in this ecosystem. It needn't be,<br>
as Java illustrates. To my mind Java's great contribution to the<br>
world is its library index--light years ahead of typical<br>
"documentation" one finds at <a href="http://haskell.org" target="_blank">haskell.org</a>, which lacks the guiding<br>
hand of a flesh-and-blood librarian. In this matter, it<br>
seems, industrial curation can achieve clarity more easily than<br>
open source.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I disagree with that. For me, one of the best things about Haskell community is Hackage, where I can actually find and browse package documentation in a centralized way. In these days, Maven or Ivy (for automatically resolving and getting Java dependencies) are seen as great tools for Java ecosystem, and in Haskell we have that, with an even easier way to add packages and new versions to the index!</div>
<div>Indeed, I find that Hackage enables a workflow not available in any other programming language: say you don't find a feature in Hackage libraries. Well, you can be pretty sure that no one has programmed a library for your task (opposed to Java or .NET, where it may be a commercial library, and be found somewhere random in the internet). Once you program it, you can upload it to Hackage and share easily with the rest of the community.</div>
<div>Finally, even though we may argue about the point that "core" Java libraries have better documentation that "core" Haskell libraries (although libraries such as "container" even give complexity bounds to their operations), I find better Haskell documentation for other different resources: see the free-available "Learn you a Haskell", "Real World Haskell" (just to name some tutorials), the Snap and Yesod documentation (as opposed to the documentation of other web frameworks in the wild)...</div>
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