I loved learning Haskell in university. It's an interesting language. I came into intro CS class thinking I could already program & the class would just be about sharpening my axe. Then my intro CS class started with Haskell which threw my brain for a loop and made me think about programming completely differently. That was a great intellectual experience and good for my long term thinking.
Haskell also seems like an incredibly impractical choice for a production language that only a stubborn purist would make. Of course the last bit is purely opinion, your experience may vary.
Getting a web application started in Ruby is easy because it does so much for you out of the box.
There are frameworks that make similar choices for you in Haskell as well: IHP, Yesod, etc.
I think taking two weeks to "set up" a Haskell project is a bit long but I read it as the author taking two weeks to learn enough Haskell to make two rather advanced libraries work together... which means they had to make all the little micro decisions that frameworks make for you, etc. With more experience that could've been done in less time.
If they had started with IHP I think it would've been your usual day or two.
It's enough to make Haskell really seem like a reasonable choice to "jump in with" without fear of never reaching some mundane goal.
And if I was new to Java, I wouldn't know which frameworks I wanted...
npx create-react-app foo-app
cd foo-app
yarn start
That doesn’t make React great nor solve all of the issues that lie between minute 1 and v0.1 in production, but the startup is smooth and painless (for me who comes from C/C++/C#/SQL, and my javascript is at a level where beginners can still help me).
curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
cat > ./script.sh <<EOF
#! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell <nixpkgs> -i runghc -p "ghc.withPackages (x: [ x.yesod ])"
{-# LANGUAGE ExtendedDefaultRules #-}
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-}
import Yesod
data App = App
mkYesod "App" [parseRoutes|
/ HomeR GET
|]
instance Yesod App
getHomeR = return $ object ["msg" .= "Hello!"]
port = 3000
main = warp port App
EOF
chmod +x ./script.sh
./script.shAnd several others listed here: https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_education
- “The ‘monad’ abstraction is excellent for dealing with code with a lot of failure conditions (ie. parsing) and avoids ‘pyramid of doom’ type code. Haskell worked out really well in this key area.”
- “Another strong positive for writing Deadpendency was testing. Haskell has a lesser-known style of testing libraries that do ‘property based testing’ (PBT).”
- “Haskell is very safe to refactor thanks to the type safety the compiler brings, which is probably the most important thing.”
- “My core Haskell had very few logic bugs. This is because Haskell is very safe by default and I had opted into strict types that help catch edge cases”
- “At this point I think it is actually pretty stable. I consider the project a big success. A huge part of this has been due to Haskell and its excellent ecosystem.”