codeworld VS Cabal

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#

Alternatively, I'm a big fan of https://code.world which is specifically geared towards learners who want to work up to making simple games. It's kind of a toy, but imo resembles a "real" programming language a lot more than other educational programming languages

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.

Try https://code.world/

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.

That's a matter of tooling and environment. You can have a look at examples of drawing animations with physics simulation and user input at https://code.world. It's pure Haskell code without any scary abstractions, just functions from state to the next state.

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.

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

Given that Mike Pilgrim (the Stack maintainer) is on Windows, and Cabal has issues on Windows, I think it might be easier to get Windows specific fixes merged in Stack.

The error message is not too helpful. This is the target of a long-standing ticket: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/7993 Your help would be very welcome.

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

I created this issue a few months ago: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8270

Reported this as a bug in cabal.

We definitely plan to have benchmarks once we start working on performance. We haven't started yet because there were more urgent tasks. For example: ensuring that the testsuite runs on CI with the JS backend (should be completed this week or the next), ensuring that the toolchain works properly (we're writing a tutorial and we've found new bugs, e.g. yesterday I've fixed the support for js-sources in Cabal https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/8636), adding TH support...