The policies of the various OS-level package managers tend
to make it difficult for maintainers to update
<snip>
Ok, thanks for explanation. I happily use Linux Mint for all kinds
of stuff with no problems relating to package versions. But it looks
like stack is the way to go.
Rambling here:
I left Haskell three years ago or so in disgust. I was in grad
school at the time and was compelled to use it by my supervisor.
IMHO the Haskell ecosystem back then was a fucking pile of shit. It
was fine for the researchy stuff I was doing (not in programming
languages, exactly). But a total uphill battle to actually write
anything else in. And no, this is NOT just about struggling to
overcome imperative PL mindset.
I felt that learning Haskell gave me all the wonderful advantages of
being fluent in Esperanto.
It turns out that to this very day I am totally devoid of
fucks to give about Haskell's theoretical beauty and "if it compiles
I just know it's right".
I now need to interface to a huge amount of stuff for scientific,
numerical, and graphical software that is already written in C, C++
(which I detest) and sometimes Fortran. I guess that means I mostly
need glue, which means one thing: Python. and when I do have
to write something from scratch I am much more comfortable in (gasp)
Common Lisp: a little-used language with (compared to Haskell) very
few theoretical scruples. I tend to use an sorta-kinda functional
style in CL. I must admit that I sometimes do miss a good type
system. But not must-do-state-in-monads.
So anyway if there has been some kind of reasonable improvement in
the ecosystem I may recover some of the investment I put into
learning FP. Or not. Maybe it's sunk costs.
I have know idea why I wasted my time and yours by blurting all this
out in response to your helpful post. Perhaps I had a minor stroke
that destroyed the neurons responsible for self-editing and
self-awareness. So I guess I'll be joining the Tea Party soon.