hython VS stackage

This really resonates with me.

I’ve been using it in a decidedly industrial application for about 1.5 years now. I had some fairly significant experience with it prior (https://github.com/mattgreen/hython).

For the first time in a long time (20 years experience) I’ve needed to learn a significant amount of things. It’s a combo of the domain and the language. It’s rather exhilarating, and also exhausting. Could also be a lot to bite off on with a busy home life too.

Regardless, the language is brilliant. My manager exhorts me to generally write in a top-down manner a lot because Haskell’s flexibility really conveys dev intent well, so think hard about how it should read, and start from there. This is a huge mindset shift from most langs, where you can feel your brain shut off to save cycles as you type “function” over and over. It really feels like it is meant to be write-friendly. Point-free functions are wonderfully terse to write. I joke that TH is my favorite language: a type-checked macro language that lets me write almost anything I want.

And there’s the rub: even with controlled effects via monads, the syntax is still hard for me to scan and read. I don’t know if this comes eventually or what, but this feels like a function of how dense a line could be. I miss early return dearly, and understand why it isn’t a thing (except if you have a MonadZero at hand) but I know it’s a syntactic transformation that won’t make it in. I really miss the amazing Rust LSP. Haskell’s recently lost the ability to flesh out pattern matches due to Haskell internals shifting with 9.x. I still hate and screw up stacking monads. Compile times can be brutal, esp if you hit the lens library.

I really think the community is one of the strongest group of programmers I’ve already seen. I don’t want to belabor this and dwell on the big brain memes, it’s more that they think hard on this stuff and actually push forward, vs just telling each other that web frameworks are rocket science and it’s impossible to do better than what it exists.

Ultimately, Haskell fits like a glove for our domain of program analysis. Beyond that, I’d still be a bit wary. I’m still thirsty for a PL that is essentially OCaml but with a better syntax. But that’s just me.

Writing Haskell programs that rely on third-party packages is still an issue when it’s a not actively maintained package. They get out of date with the base library (Haskell’s standard library), and you might see yourself in a situation where you need to downgrade to an older version. This is not exclusive to Haskell, but it happens more often than I’d like to assume. However, if you only rely on known well-maintained libraries/frameworks such as Aeson, Squeleto, Yesod, and Parsec, to name a few, it’s unlikely you will face troubles at all, you just need to be more mindful of what you add as a dependency. There’s stackage.org now, a repository that works with Stack, providing a set of packages that are proven to work well together and help us to have reproducible builds in a more manageable way—not the solution for all the cases but it’s good to have it as an option.

> That is fine, as far as it goes, but obviously this will, at some point, be at odds with the interests of programmers looking to use Haskell as a practical, stable tool.

That's what Stackage is.

Stackage provides consistent sets of Haskell packages, known to build together and pass their tests before becoming Stackage Nightly snapshots and LTS (Long Term Support) releases. [1]

Java will never get this.

[1] https://www.stackage.org/

makefile_dir := $(dir $(abspath $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)))) export PATH := $(makefile_dir):$(PATH) project_name ?= project_main ?= src/.hs retag_file ?= $(project_main) stack.yaml: @test -f stack.yaml || (echo -e "This makefile requires a 'stack.yaml' for your project.\nYou don't need to use 'stack' to build your project.\nYou just need a 'stack.yaml' specifying a resolver compatible with your GHC version.\nSee https://www.stackage.org/" && exit 1) stack: stack.yaml @which stack || (echo -e "This makefile requires 'stack' to be on your path. Use GHCup to install it.\nSee https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/" && exit 1) .PHONY: stack warning.txt: -@uname -a | grep -q Darwin && echo "WARNING: On Mac, you must alias 'make' to 'gmake' in your shell config file (e.g. ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc). Symbolic links will not work." | tee warning.txt @echo "Add 'warning.txt' to your .gitignore file if you never want to see this message again." hasktags: warning.txt stack @echo 'stack exec -- hasktags' > hasktags @chmod +x hasktags @echo "You might like to add 'hasktags' to your .gitignore file." format: stack @stack exec -- fourmolu --stdin-input-file $(project_main) .PHONY: format retag: warning.txt stack @stack exec -- haskdogs -i $(retag_file) --hasktags-args "-x -c -a" | sort -u -o tags tags .PHONY: retag tags: warning.txt hasktags stack @stack exec -- haskdogs .PHONY: tags ghcid: stack @stack exec -- ghcid \ --command 'stack repl --ghc-options "-fno-code -fno-break-on-exception -fno-break-on-error -v1 -ferror-spans -j"' \ --restart stack.yaml \ --restart $(project_name).cabal \ --warnings \ --outputfile ./ghcid.txt .PHONY: ghcid

(why lts-18.28? it's the latest 8.10 release on https://www.stackage.org/ )

I don't see way community maintenance can change the GHC for nightly.

It makes total sense that it fails since at no point I requested that the library be installed, which makes me wonder: Is there any way to request Hackage to install SDL and GLEW before attempting the build? I see Stackage has debian-bootstrap.sh. Does something similar exist for Hackage?

At this point, you can try a Stack snapshot that uses an older version of GHC. Looking at Stackage, you can see that the latest version before 8.10.* is 8.8.4 (using LTS 16.31). Starting over with that snapshot, you find that the packages that you need are in the snapshot and work.

On the contrary, I think this is standard practice for packages which are part of stackage. When stackage nightly switches to a new version of ghc, all the packages which are incompatible with the new ghc are dropped from nightly. My understanding is that maintainers are then expected to fix their packages, at which point more and more packages are included in the nightly snapshot. The next lts to include that version of ghc is only released later, once most packages have been added back, so unlike ghc users who diligently upgrade to the latest ghc, stackage users who diligently upgrade the latest lts snapshot shouldn't see a big drop in the number of compatible packages.

I found the latest stack lts version, and it's associated ghc version here: https://www.stackage.org/