Broadly speaking, we can say cabal-install and stack are frontends to Cabal . Both tools make it possible to build Haskell projects whose sets of dependencies might conflict with each other within the confines of a single system.
I appreciate that answer is 2017, and things might have changed since. But there’s plenty of confusing-them q’s on SO and reddit; preferences seem to have changed over the years; one tool has caught up/got ahead of another; then the position reversed. (Or perhaps the answers mean that one tool is a better fit to a particular way of working – that would be your “placed different emphasis”.)
These are distinctions that are going to be way beyond a newbie’s grokking. So firstly, I think it’s incumbent on instructors to make the choice and give detailed instructions to learners/set up a learning sandbox, etc, etc. Secondly, speaking for myself, I found your long answer too much in the weeds.
So I see no strong reason to use either tool. They both seem to add unnecessary complexity. All I want is programs. GHC out-of-the-box delivers that.
Addit: Also I had this in mind, from the thread we split from (thank you @atravers )
Stack … just like Cabal-the-tool, it is implemented using Cabal-the-library. Therefore, a first answer to the questions at hand is that stack is Cabal: …
Again that’s old: 2015. If what it says no longer holds, perhaps we should enter a caveat on the original thread?
I could believe one tool is more friendly for newbies. I’m also nervous that having started with one tool, it’s awkward to switch to the other. This is a bunch of considerations we ‘just’ shouldn’t inflict on a newbie to puzzle out.
[end of Addit]