Wow! Haskell tooling + language is so much better than when I last used it

#1

Hi everyone!

I’ve been away from Haskell for a while. Back when I used it (2 years or so ago), the tooling was not working at all for me. Most of what I do is webdev, and so dealing with records was such a pain.

Now I’m trying out the latest version of Haskell-tools for neovim along with record dot syntax and holy crap everything just works so well. It used to be that when I enabled some language extensions, HLS stopped working. Now it’s blazing fast and it’s even faster feedback than the feedback I get in Typescript! Code lenses are also such an insane feature, I can’t wait to play around with it more.

Kudos to all the great work :hugs:.

That’s all I really had to say

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#2

I started using Haskell right around when ghc 8.0 were released, and I’ve watched the tooling grow immeasurably better over the following years. I watched stack get released, take over from cabal, then nix support improved, then cabal got way better to the point that I don’t use stack or nix anymore, and now we have ghcup and hls and honestly, every time I hear the criticism “Haskell is a dead language” from someone, I know they haven’t used Haskell since like 2016. (Its doubly ironic given how many recently popular languages have become so by embracing concepts that Haskell has been championing for decades!)

Haskell no longer has a tooling problems - now it has a PR problems, and we need more Haskell evangelists :slight_smile:

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#4

My own experience with Haskell tooling over the past few years mirrors yours. My experience with HLS has been that it’s fast, stable, and easy to set up for quite some time now, and it really makes writing Haskell even more fun. Build tools are far more convenient than they used to be, and the advent of ghcup makes it easy to install and manage both the usual suspects and more obscure variants.

Thank you to everyone who’s been putting in the work to make this all so much better!

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#5

I think most issues I’ve seen people raise against Haskell aren’t as true anymore.

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#6

I’m a cpp developer, I’m learning haskell on the side and I can confirm that the tooling is really good so far. The only thing I don’t understand is why haskell is not more mainstream.

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#7

When you discover the answer then please let us know so we can fix it!

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#8

Some say it is a PR issue.

Additionally, being a language of ivory-tower feel can be intimidating to many. I don’t necessarily we should appease and be more watered down, but perhaps we are in a anti-intellectual environment?

Personally, knowing that there are things I don’t understand makes me excited, and there are endless of such things in Haskell; but it is not only one time I heard people say Haskell make them feel stupid and they don’t like it or even hate it.

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#9

Many volunteers have worked on this. You can support them:

Some companies that invested in or helped heavily with tooling:

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