Re: More static type fun.

From: Dirk Thierbach (dthierbach_at_gmx.de)
Date: 10/29/03 

Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 23:04:18 +0100

Erann Gat <gat@jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:

> I tried. I went to www.haskell.org and downloaded Hugs, which billed
> itself as an interpreter for Haskell that was specifically designed for
> teaching.

Hugs is a pure interpreter, and is not as actively developing as GHC
is.

> Not to put too fine a point on it, but Hugs sucks.

Yes. It's fine for experiments, but not for real development.

> It reinforced all of my negative prejudices about statically typed
> languages. You can't even enter function definitions into the
> "interpreter".

Yes. In GHC, you can (you have to start them with "let".)

The toplevel is nice more "experiments", but it doesn't work well when
you have a larger amount of code. I'd suggest editing a file, and
using the :l and :r commands. It's not considerably slower than using
the toplevel directly.

> I tried running some code snippets posted as part of this discussion
> and none of them worked.

I have run all the code snippets I made successfully with GHC. Sometimes
I have ommitted some imports, but everything else should work, unless
I introduced typos during cut and paste.

> Now, I am given to understand that Hugs is not the best that Haskell has
> to offer, but there is only so much time I have to devote to this. I
> offer this not so much as an indictment of Haskell, but as feedback to the
> Haskell community about the experience of one person who came to Haskell
> with a pretty open mind. I have not given up on Haskell yet, but my
> initial experience definitely did not impress me.

Yes. It's a known problem that there is no good IDE, and this
turns people off. Haskell is a comparatively young language, and comes
from academics. It's hard to get funding to develop an IDE; most of
the development goes into the language. There are also people who
complain that there is no good introduction, and the tutorials are too
difficult (personally, I didn't have any trouble with them when I
learned Haskell). The Helium project tries to improve at least this
situation a bit.

Your critique is completely justified. I don't know any good solution
for this problem.

If you can spare a little bit more time, keep trying. Have a look at the
tutorials first.

- Dirk

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