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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

I have found Haskell just has so many of these "paper cuts" that I have just walked away.

I agree, but I've fallen in love with Purescript[0] recently instead, and its made it easier to ease into Haskell. Although to be honest, I prefer Purescript as a language!

[0] http://www.purescript.org/

I could see that. I find that Haskell specifically is very hard to ease into, whereas a lot of similar languages are much easier. For me, I wasn't comfortable with my Haskell skills until I learned Idris, which is arguably a more difficult language -- ironically, I found the Idris documentation to be a lot more user friendly than Haskell's just because it comes from the official team (and I'm sure that Purescript is like this too). For anyone struggling to learn Haskell, I'd probably recommend a different purely functional language first (at least until haskellbook comes out).

That's because PureScript is what Haskell would be if it were written in the last 2-3 years starting from a clean slate. It doesn't have to deal with legacy code.

That's really a sad thing to hear, because for the experienced the benefits brought about by Haskell is so plainly obvious that it's obviously worth the trouble to navigate the mine of the Prelude full of legacy cruft.

My #1 issue was I work at several sites and at home. I don't really use a laptop so I just use git as a single user. The package management was such that I could never have the same environment in multiple of locations. Something would break and I spent more time fixing then doing.

That was a problem commonly called 'cabal hell'. You can alternatively use the stack build tool, https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack, which works by fixing package versions against stackage snapshots.

Before using stack I was always afraid to come back to a Haskell project after a few months, since using stack that's not a problem. Also, you don't have to worry about different machines, because stack is ensuring that you have the pretty much same build environment (at least the Haskell packages will have the exact same version).

Stack also recently added support for using Nix to solve the problem fixing non-Haskell dependencies for a project.

Well after the love affair I have with Racket wears off I just might try to start back up in Haskell. Thanks! Love the idea of using nix.

This looks so much better than Cabal.

Why have I never heard about it in all the guides and StackOverflow answers I've had to search through when trying to escape Cabal hell?

The project has existed only since last summer.

mcbuilder has already mentioned it, but I really want to emphasize that dependency management in Haskell is an entirely different story now with stack.

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