On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Mihai Maruseac
Hello,
A friend of mine tried to install Haskell Platform and Leksah on Windows and was troubled by the amount of problems he encountered as a beginner in this. I've told him to ask over IRC and mailing list but it seems he has some problems with registration.
Anyway, he blogged about his problems at http://dorinlazar.ro/haskell-platform-windows-crippled/ and I'm sure that we can work on fixing some of them.
I don’t agree with too many of its conclusions and its description of Cabal is perhaps not up to date with current idioms and recommended practice —it was, after all, written three years ago—, but this article[1] did help me understand the relevant issues when I had similar thoughts. Specifically, I don’t think it’s a good idea to rely on the distribution’s package manager for Haskell packages —mostly a non‐issue in Windows, of course—, so I would disregard that suggestion; many good reasons for this are spelled out in great detail in Albert Lai’s SICP[2]. I have no doubt that the complexity of these issues discourages beginners unfamiliar with Haskell development, having gone through this myself, but these really are difficult problems with no generally accepted ideal solution. Other development environments will happily install packages with a much higher probability of breaking at runtime, and the general doctrine of static correctness guarantees espoused by this community brings only as much complexity as it does reliability. A tradeoff, as everything, with the unfortunate consequence, as always, of bringing discomfort to beginners. “Avoid success at all costs”, was it? [1]: http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/repeat-after-me-cabal-is-not-... [2]: http://www.vex.net/~trebla/haskell/sicp.xhtml