>
Sigh. As a college educator who is trying to use Haskell in as many classes as possible, ...
> you better fire up Notepad.exe. ... some decent syntax highlighting,
Hi Todd, and Mig, I too feel your pain. And Windows seems to have always been a neglected child in distros -- even when SPJ was actually sponsored by MSoft.
If you're only trying to give a flavour of Haskell for (say) a few weeks intro, I don't see that you even need all the drama of ghcup.
Perhaps just ignore what it says on the GHC download pages, and grab the compiler plus minimal libraries. Then you can either defer a 'proper' install until students are motivated enough to go through the pain; or don't bother/they've gone on to other subjects.
I agree syntax highlighting is very helpful for newbies: I use NotePad++ for editing and not even VSCode for compiling, but GHCi.
I suspect these fully integrated dev environments are quite confusing for newbies. (Unless they've already experienced them with other languages.) Hard for me to be sure: they simply weren't a thing when I learned Haskell. These days I have installed VSCode; I seldom use it (just way too much clutter around the screen).
AntC