I’ve noticed a trend where new Haskellers will be asking for something equivalent to Rust’s installation/build tooling story on forums like Reddit (for example). But Haskell already has a very analogous story. Cabal is pretty analogous to Cargo in a v2 world, and ghcup and rustup are obvious equivalents.
I’m not sure if this is the main reason for it, but I checked out the Haskell “Getting Started” page with fresh eyes and noticed something when I compared it to Rust’s.
Rust’s goes all the way to setting up a Cargo project, adding a dependency, and running a program using that dependency (the cute ferris-says package).
Haskell’s goes to using ghci (which is an essential tool for beginners learning the language). It does mention Cabal but that’s it. It doesn’t explain to a new Haskeller how to set up a project and start building something by leveraging our nice ecosystem on Hackage. There’s even a haskell-say package already.
I think intermediate/experienced programmers coming from other mainstream languages will have no trouble understanding cabal + ghcup. In fact, I think they have an expectation that they exist many popular languages nowadays have solid installation and package manager stories.
It’ll take some effort to write a good intro tutorial, but stealing from Rust’s seems like a good idea.