On 2014年04月16日 01:31, Mike Meyer wrote:
This points out at least one other benefit of HP: it provides a larger set of libraries for people learning Haskell to get started with before having to learn how to deal with cabal and the possibilities of cabal hell.
It may be that this isn't real - that the recent and good or popular tutorials all work fine with just GHC, in which case ignore me. On the other hand, if they all deal with cabal at one point or another, possibly HP needs better curation: audit what's there to make sure it's the best choice, drop things that aren't useful, expand it to include critical libraries that are required by the tutorials, etc.
There are indeed packages in Haskell Platform that are beneficial for beginners who may not want to have to deal with Cabal yet: HUnit and QuickCheck. By the way, I do not think that using Cabal is particularly troublesome these days, as long as sandboxes are used. Perhaps it becomes difficult to use on Windows, but blaming Cabal for that would be like blaming a flower for the poor smell of the manure in which it is planted... We try to engineer the smell of the flower to cover the smell of the manure, but the strong flower smell can be overwhelming in cleaner environments. ;) Cheers, Travis