Hello Mihai, you bring up 2 unrelated questions, i'll address them seperately 1) Leksah should not be considered an "official haskell ide", but merely one of many community supported editing tools. And frankly one of the less widely used ones at that! Leksah is not used much at all by anyone, though theres probably a handful of folks who do use it. Many folks use editors like Sublime Tex (2/3), Emacs, Vi(m), textmate, and many more. Its worth noting that the sublime-haskell plugin for sublime text, and analogous packages for many other editors, provide haskell IDE-like powers, or at least a nice subset thereof. 2) There are people working on building better easily portable native gui toolkits, but in many respects, a nice haskelly gui toolkit is still something people are experimetning with how to do well. theres lots of great tools out as of the past year or two, many more in progress on various time scales, and gtk2hs is great for linux (and thats fine). cheers -Carter On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 1:18 AM, Mihai Maruseac wrote:

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. -- MM "All we have to decide is what we do with the time that is given to us"

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On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Mihai Maruseac wrote:

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