So WASH is ancient history. OK, lets forget it.
How about the Haskell Platform? Is that ancient history? Certainly not: it doesn't compile on anything but the very newest GHC. Not 7.4.1 but 7.4.2. Now that's rapid maintenance, but it's still version hell because you've got to have that compiler installed first (even though HP is supposed to be a way to acquire haskell) and you probably haven't. You've probably got the one from the linux package which hasn't been maintained since, ooh, must have been at least a week ago, so you install the new one and you've trashed cabal. How long is that puzzle gonna take to unravel? That's how I spent my afternoon today, instead of getting on with my job. Now you might think I was silly not to have uninstalled the linux package first, but I tried, and then decided against it because it thought the entire OS depended on it and actually proposed to remove everything from clib to googleearth as a solution. It's not Haskell's fault that linux package management is as broken as any other for the same reasons, but in an imperfect world, it's better not to keep moving the furniture around.
Why was I trying to build the Haskell Platform at all? Because it wasn't obvious to me that a 7 year old library would be doomed. I find it perfectly normal to be able to compile C code from the 1970s but still run STL through the same compiler. That's why I blamed the system instead of the library. And unless somebody can explain to me how I would rescue my business now if I had opted for WASH in that long-forgotten era when Barack Obama was barely known, a Russian spy was poisoned with Polonium and a Sudanese man was ordered to marry a goat he was caught in an intimate position with, then I still see it that way.
Adrian.