
I'm still learning Haskell and also evaluating whether I want to use the language in my work. It seems like a fascinating language so far (although I don't know if laziness will be a detriment later for me eventually), but I'm a bit worried about the overall quality of its GHC implementation. For example, I tried installing GHC-6.10.2 on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine (probably the most mainstream Linux these days). 1st attempt: binary => failed "the impossible happened, report bug" (I think it's already in bugzilla for an even earlier version) 2nd attempt: source and docs => followed README, but "make" failed while building docs 3rd attempt: source only, no docs => make install succeeded, but ghci now seems to have its "readline" screwed up (no editing, can't quit even with Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D), while Ubuntu-bundled 6.8.* ghci works fine in this regard. If these kinds of issues are common only during installation, I can live with that, but if GHC is flaky overall, having to deal with this may cancel out whatever productivity advantages Haskell provides. If the quality of the installation procedures is different from the compiler itself, can you explain why?