Cabal VS codeworld

Also, there's already a cabal RFC to support toml: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/7548

Cabal has a lot of dark corners once you stray from the happy path. Just checked and I'm currently subscribed to 37 threads on the issue tracker, and I'm not a maintainer. A lot of these are related to lesser-used features like cabal scripts, environment files and doctests (though I think all of these things would used more if they were more reliable), but there's also plenty of stupid stuff like: - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3313 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8527 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8391 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/7789 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/6888 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/6999 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/5271

By the way, there are some open issues for the command to add a package in Cabal.

That's interesting. Could you could open a an issue about this? https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues

At the moment, cabal-install doesn't support hpack natively but if the project can be build with cabal-install, you can run hpack manually to produce the .cabal file and utilise dr-cabal after that :)

Hm thanks for that, could try out some of those ideas. Here's the github issue i opened for this: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8580

Would really love it if the Cabal documentation had this as its own, highly visible entry. I submitted a pull request to that end.

Sometimes cabal's output is confusing with regards to optimization levels: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/6221

Direct link to changelog: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/blob/master/release-notes/cabal-install-3.8.1.0.md

Code World[1] is a great project that addresses a number of the problems from the article, with an eye towards using Haskell to teach children basic math and programming simultaneously. Code World directly addresses a number of the obstacles outlined in this article:

1. Using an online editor with a rich built-in library removes any toolchain problems.

2. A custom standard library simplifies pedagogically unnecessary details like Foldable

3. The custom standard library also avoids currying (f(a, b) for functions rather than f a b)

4. Custom error messages improve the feedback students get from the compiler

I would highly recommend Code World to anybody looking to teach programming with Haskell. If you want to teach Haskell in a way that fits the existing ecosystem, it's also possible to run Code World without the custom standard library[2].

[1]: https://code.world/#

[2]: https://code.world/haskell#

Loose connection, but made me remember https://code.world/ uses a Haskell-like functional language to define still pictures, animations, or even games.

I second gloss! It's a bit limited (no sound, fonts, nor even text centering, but you do have support for vector and bitmap graphics, color manipulation, mouse, keyboard, and animations), but it's so, so easy to use that I not only recommend it (or the similar Code World) for anybody's first game, I still use it for my newer games.

Two that I can think of:

- Bootstrap teaches a toned-down version of Racket (i.e. Scheme): https://bootstrapworld.org/materials/spring2021/en-us/course... . It's taught in some schools as well as a comp sci curriculum.

- https://code.world/ teaches using a toned-down version of Haskell. To my knowledge it's not used in schools.

I had the silly 'fromString' error you get when using RebindableSyntax but had forgotten what to do next. Quick Google search and I hit on codeworld #59.

I'm not a user myself, but I understand Lambdabot and mueval depend on it. More generally, anything that executes Haskell code supplied by untrusted users would fit the bill. I don't know if CodeWorld for example allows user-supplied modules, but if it did they'd have to be Safe.

I also have a list of about 300 or so packages at https://github.com/google/codeworld/blob/master/codeworld-available-pkgs/codeworld-available-pkgs.cabal, which I'd like Cabal to solve and find compatible versions to make available, preferably without listing them all on one massive command line! There are limits on the length of a command line. I don't know if cabal install --lib will expose packages that are dependencies, but not actually listed on the command line, in the resulting environment.

You know, now that you mention it, that sounds familiar. There's an issue for this at https://github.com/google/codeworld/issues/1182, and having cabal set up an environment file for GHC is mentioned there. There are some other complications: for example, with cabal v2-install, I can't seem to list multiple packages in local directories. So the answer to that seems to be creating a cabal.project file that lists them all... but then I want to install all of the packages from that cabal.project file into the environment, and their dependencies, and also make the consistent set of dependency versions that work with them (as chosen by Cabal's constraint solver) available in an environment for any further projects built against those same libraries.

You could also use code.world with a guide here. It is meant as a beginner-friendly introduction to Haskell. It also has an online environment, so you won't need to install anything.