If you are willing / able to report these pain points in detail to the Haskell Foundation, this is going to be valuable feedback that will help orient the investments in tooling in the near future.
All bug reports are good. But is this not obvious? Do the Haskell developers not use other language ecosystems? This goes beyond “this edge case is difficult” and into “the whole tooling stack is infamously hard to work with.” I just assumed Haskell, like eMacs, attracted a certain kind of developer that embraced the warts.
* Has an IDE which constantly puts itself into a bad state. E.g. it highlights and underlines code with red even when I know it's a pristine copy that passes its tests. I periodically have to close the project, navigate to it in the terminal, run 'git status --ignored' and delete all that crap and re-open the project.
* Is slow to start up.
* Has a build system with no obvious way to use a 'master list' of version numbers. In our microservice/microrepo system, it is a PITA to try to track down and remove a vulnerable dependency.
* Has been receiving loads of praise over the last 18 months for starting to include stuff that Haskell has included for ages. How's the latest "we're solving the null problem" going?
What the GHC compiler does for me is just so much better at producing working software than $DAYJOB language + professional $DAYJOB IDE, that I don't think about the tooling.
If you want to put yourself in my shoes: imagine you're getting shit done with TypeScript every day, and some C programmers come along and complain that it's missing the bare minimum of tools: strace, valgrind and gdb. How do you even reply to that?
> If you want to put yourself in my shoes: imagine you're getting shit done with TypeScript every day, and some C programmers come along and complain that it's missing the bare minimum of tools: strace, valgrind and gdb. How do you even reply to that?
You tell them to strace/valgrind node whatever.js and instead of gdb use built-in v8 debugger as node inspect whatever.js
We do use other ecosystems, yes. I haven't really found the tooling for Haskell to be particularly obstructive compared to other languages. I've run into plenty of mysteries in the typescript, python, ObjC/Swift, etc. ecosystems that have been just as irritating (sometimes much more irritating), and generally find that while HLS can be a bit janky, GHC is very good and I spend less time scratching my head looking at a piece of code that should work but does something wild than in other languages.
I think tooling is something that is clearly on a good trajectory. When I consider what the Haskell tooling was like when I first started using it, well, it was non-existent! (and Cabal didn't even understand what dependencies were, haha!)
So, it's much, much better than it was. It's still not comparable to mainstream languages, but it's going the right way. So, I wouldn't necessarily take that as the killer.
The biggest issue was the library ecosystem. We spent an not-small amount of time evaluating libraries, realising they were not up to scratch, trying to do build our own, or interacting with the authors to understand the plans. When you're trying to get moving at the start of a project, this can be quite painful. It takes longer to get to an MVP. That's tough when there are eyes on its success or not.
Even though I'd been using Haskell for at least a decade before we embarked upon that path, I hadn't really ever built anything substantial. The greenfield project was a complex beast on a number of levels (which was one of the reasons I felt Haskell would excel, it would force us to be more robust with our architecture). But, we just couldn't find the libraries that were good enough.
My sense was there's a lot of academics writing libraries. I'm not implying that academics write poor code; just that their motivations aren't always aligned with what an industry dev might want. Usually this is around simplicity and ease-of-use. And, because quite a lot of libraries were either poorly documented or their intent was impenetrable, it would take longer to evaluate.
I think if the Haskell Foundation are going to do anything, then they should probably write down the top 50 needed packages in industry, and then put some funding/effort towards helping the authors of existing libraries to bring them up to scratch (or potentially, developing their own), perhaps even create a 'mainstream adoption style guide', that standardises the library surfaces -- there's far too much variability. It needs a keen eye on what your average industry dev needs though.
I realise there are plenty of companies using Haskell successfully, so this should only be one data point. But, it is a data point of someone who is a massive Haskell (language) fan.
Haskell has had a massive influence on me and how I write code. It's directly influenced a major open-source project I have developed [1]. But, unfortunately, I don't think I'll use it again for a pro project.
