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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

Tooling is so critical to the uptake of a language it surprises me that more effort isn't expanded in that area for more niche languages that want to see their popularity increase.

I guess it's a 'chicken-and-egg' problem. Popular languages get tooling investment because they are popular.

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The tooling situation has improved a lot in the haskell ecosystem in the last year.

E.g. with Haskell Language Server there's now a good and standard way for having autocompletion, etc. inside VSCode and other editors.

In the web development space we now have IHP, which is like rails but with type-safety. It's already the second largest haskell framework, even though it was just launched last year: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/ (Disclaimer: I'm founder of the company that makes IHP)

> In the web development space we now have IHP, which is like rails but with type-safety. It's already the second largest haskell framework

Second to Yesod, I presume? How do you measure size, as in, what exactly is the quantity you measure, and how do you go about calculating/estimating that quantity?

Measured by GitHub stars, which is a good proxy:

https://star-history.t9t.io/#digitallyinduced/ihp&yesodweb/y...

We also have a very active community, e.g. over 100 people in Slack, over 180 in Gitter, over 100 weekly active projects (https://ihp-telemetry.digitallyinduced.com/admin/Events <- here's some telemetry)

Wow, that line is so steep it looks like the number of COVID-19 infections. Congratulations!

Things are slowly improving. For example you now have the Haskell Language Server (https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server) which makes it way simpler to integrate haskell into your editor.

I'm using VSCode and the official extension (https://github.com/haskell/vscode-haskell). The default experience is not at the level of what I have with Go or Typescript but already quite good (though it's not that stable IMHO, I have to restart the server more than I would like).

The Haskell Platform (https://www.haskell.org/platform/) makes it simple to install almost everything you need to get started (the compiler, standard libraries, build tools, etc).

It's not there yet, the beginner dev experience is still painful and frustrating, but things improved quite a lot.

I understand the point and I wasn't criticizing Haskell because it isn't just Haskell that has this problem. It was a general observation from my own personal experience working with Haxe, Erlang, and Dart. The tooling for all was mediocre at best in the early days, and all of them gotten better (I lost track of Haxe and Erlang a few years back), but my general observation is that it really isn't enough to come up with a nice language (and all of them were/are nice languages). After the compiler and runtime, the community has to have a laser focus on tooling and bootstrapping because that will be a huge factor in whether the language increases in popularity or not. And we see examples of this all over the place. For example, Rails (and Ruby) become as popular as solely because they were so easy to setup.

Yes, 100% this.

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