Tony Morris

In my experience, "by and large it works" is the best usable solution Haskell currently has. What do you have that is better than stack at allowing people to easily install Haskell software?

Well, my team uses nix, but I would also never burden a student with that either. There are better solutions to stack in every context, but it's not the same solution in each of those contexts.

Context: Haskell learner wants to write a small project that uses a few Haskell libraries from hackage. "Nix" is too much of a burden to learn simultaneously. "cabal install" fails cryptically. What should the learner do?

Here's a thing. What do you think we were doing, students and teachers alike, before any of these existed? [cabal, nix, stack] Like, what were we doing? Tripping, falling and picking ourselves up? What?

I'm not talking about students or other people coerced into using Haskell. And before stack, many of these did trip, fall, and just give up on Haskell.

Lies.

If they were going to give up that easily, maybe programming isnt for them?

who said it was easily? Haskell isn't purely for pedagogy. People want to be productive with it. If it takes hours and hours to install existing libraries, every reasonable developer will understand haskellers just don't value productivity and use something else.