Hello, everyone,
I was just in the process of trying to get Haskell 7.6 installed. First
I surveyed all the current OSes that seemed to support it. FreeBSD 9.1
seemed like a good candidate. However, FreeBSD 9.1 has many practical
problems of its own. So far, I have 7.4 installed, but not 7.6. Would
the MAC be better at this? Anyway, it seems that much of Hackage will
not be usable. Perhaps I should just run it on Windows, as it seems
likely to install there and much of Hackage already didn't work there.
I welcome any constructive suggestions.
Best Regards,
Byron Hale
On 5/1/2013 10:27 PM, Adrian May wrote:
Hi All,
Please don't interpret this as a rant: I'm just feeling a bit
disappointed about probably having to give up on Haskell.
Let's face it: this decision to change the default syntax in GHC7
means that right now Haskell looks about as stable as Ruby on Rails.
I just tried to use Flippi. It broke because of the syntax change so I
tried WASH. I couldn't even install it because of the syntax change. I
persisted for a while but gave up because getPackageId doesn't exist
in any form at all anymore. This was only the install script: what
would WASH itself have in store for me to get my brain around?
What are my choices here:
1) Revert to GHC6 or put pragmas and compiler switches everywhere,
switch 2010 off globally with cabal or even make an alias of ghc: That
means I'll gradually clash with people who decide ...
2) Convert all my code and a lot of other peoples' to the new syntax,
thereby exacerbating the problem that ruled out 1.
Either way, we're looking at a long period during which a large
portion of the libraries will be incompatible with the other portion,
and nobody will know which style to write. I don't know if or when
WASH or any other library will convert, or even if I'd prefer that to
happen sooner or later, because that would depend on when other
libraries do and how I'd worked around it in the meantime. Altogether
that means I can't sensibly decide to rely on any library, so I can't
use Haskell. I'll just have to go back to fumbling around in XSL, PHP
and the like. Is Haskell 2010 really so much better that it justifies
this?
I just saw that movie "The Words": the moral of the story is that you
shouldn't try to change your mistakes.
...
Apparently it's not only 2010. I now find that buildng the Haskell
Platform wants GHC 7.4.2, not 7.4.1 because of the line "import
Prelude" (if I remember rightly,) and even when I follow the rules
precisely I still get several different deprecation warnings. The
prelude is not exactly obscure. If you deprecate that you've broken
everything. Is it really impossible to keep such a basic mantra
meaningful from one minor version to the next? Java was fond of
deprecating things in the early days, but when they said "deprecated"
they didn't mean "switched off", let alone that it would lead to a
syntax error. They just meant "not trendy anymore."
It's a very common illusion to believe that the central thing in your
life is also the central thing in everybody else's. That's why things
like Norton take over your whole machine: those guys believe that the
only reason you bought the computer was to fight viruses, because
that's what most of the machines in their office were bought for.
There seems to be something similar going on in the way Haskellers are
expected to update all their code whenever GHC decide to issue an
update. But in reality we have jobs of our own. I'd like to choose
Haskell over XSL because I think it'll enable me to write web sites
more efficiently, not because I want to forget all about my job and
savour the brilliance of the latest Haskell version. But in reality
I'm just sitting here waiting for the Platform to compile just in case
it's the Ubuntu package's fault, but I know it won't help. I'll just
get other problems instead. Reality is that the whole ecosytem is in
disarray because of this lack of respect for backward compatibility.
At least Rails can plead that it's relatively new, but Haskell has
been around for over 20 years.
I understand that progress has to be made, and it would be nice if
people did just update all their code quickly so you could switch off
old stuff and move on. But it's not hard to survey the code that's out
there and see how much stuff you'd be breaking if you did. If it's not
a lot, then switching it off to wake them up would be an acceptable
compromise. But it looks to me as if a lot of very important stuff is
still failing on the GHC from November 2010, so clearly things are
going too fast. Adding new stuff is great, and sometimes the new stuff
clashes with the old stuff. But how much of that deprecated stuff
really *needed* to be switched off, and couldn't the new stuff
have been designed so as not to force that?
In principle this is the best language on the planet, but with all
these version gotchas I don't know that I can use it anymore. What a
tragedy. I can't even think of a suggestion as to how Haskell should
try to get out of this mess now.
Adrian.
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