
They also mentioned Chromebooks, for which a one-line-paste installer
requires jailbreaking (and not all Chromebooks can be jailbroken even
if students are willing to go that direction). Then again, I suspect
any compiler without a full IDE is a loss in that situation.
As to Macs, I believe we've had a few problems with incorrectly signed
packages which require some extra steps? And at least one report of
the (long and ugly) paste for Windows Powershell not working.
On Mon, Apr 4, 2022 at 9:45 AM Keith
However, I'm a bit puzzled by the experience of your students. The Downloads page[1] already contains a link to ghcup which is a one-click installer (or rather a one-click-to-paste-into-the-terminal installer) for the popular architectures. It should work as well on Windows and Mac as it does on Linux.
Sad to say, but even among computer science students there is a world of difference between a '1 click' installer and one line of shell code to run.
Sent from my phone with K-9 Mail.
On 4 April 2022 13:28:56 UTC, Tom Ellis
wrote: On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 10:03:11AM +0100, Julian Bradfield wrote:
On 2022-04-03, MigMit
wrote: I think I remember myself as an inexperienced user. I might've walked away from Haskell, if I was given an instruction like "to install thing X, first install thing A, then use it to install think K, and then use that to install thing X". The longer the way between becoming curious about something and actually producing an executable, the less new users you have.
We use Haskell in our first-year course. Almost all students turn up with bog-standard commodity hardware: Windows laptops, Macs, or Chromebooks, with a small proportion of Linux laptops (those people are usually ok). Every year it takes the first two weeks of semester to handhold them all through the process of getting Haskell installed and working. I don't do Windows or Mac, so I don't even know why some (but not all) have problems - but they do. They don't have the choice to walk away, but it wastes valuable learning time, and gives a negative impression. Some of them then find out that they like Haskell, and some that they hate it - I suspect more would like it if they weren't put off by the initial hurdle of getting the damn thing working at all.
Having a one-click install for the popular architectures would do a lot for new users, especially if it includes popular stuff like QuickCheck (I suppose QuickCheck is popular - I don't do Haskell, I just have to tutor it:) )
Hello Julian,
Thanks very much for sharing this perspective. The more different perspectives we hear the better idea we have of how to improve the situation for a broad range of users and use cases.
However, I'm a bit puzzled by the experience of your students. The Downloads page[1] already contains a link to ghcup which is a one-click installer (or rather a one-click-to-paste-into-the-terminal installer) for the popular architectures. It should work as well on Windows and Mac as it does on Linux.
If there is any way you could share more detailed experience reports with us I would be very grateful. Perhaps there's something we can fix or improve, but I don't know yet what!
Tom
[1] https://www.haskell.org/downloads/ _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.
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