

The Haskell Platform 2011.2 is out: GHC 7 for all  - dons
http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/

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gurraman
Very nice! I've never written anything in Haskell beyond configuring Xmonad,
so I don't know if this is how it works in the Haskell-world, but presenting
it this way (the "Robust"-section in particular) really gives me the feeling
that this is a great platform to explore. Libraries are extremely important,
and choosing between similar ones leads to anxiety.

I think many languages should take after this. If not distribute libraries
with the platform (batteries included), at-least bless some libraries. It'd be
so much easier to get started with some languages (cough, Erlang) if
authoritative characters in the loop would share their opinions.

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johnbender
Shameless plug here, but if you're interested in installing the platform but
don't want it clogging up your dev environment I've created a snap project
skeleton that will do it for you with Vagrant and Chef.

[http://johnbender.us/2011/03/05/snap-setup-from-scratch-
the-...](http://johnbender.us/2011/03/05/snap-setup-from-scratch-the-vagrant-
way/)

Snap is the only extra install and you can quite easily alter the haskell
platform version in the Vagrantfile. I'll be updating this tonight when I get
home if you don't mind waiting.

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thisrod
It would be nice for this site to give more detailed advice on studying
Haskell. Learning a language should be a side effect of studying its canon of
programs. Is there a book that relates to Haskell as TAoCP does to machine
code, SICP to Scheme, K&R to C, and the dragon book to Lex and Yacc?

~~~
jmillikin
Real World Haskell: < <http://book.realworldhaskell.org/> >

Written by three of the most prolific and capable Haskell library developers.
It covers everything from introductory functional concepts to high-performance
C-style stateful programming.

You can buy a dead tree, or read it online for free.

~~~
danieldk
At the time, the book seemed like a fresh breath of air, since it focused on
solving real 'daily work'-style problems in Haskell. I used to recommend it to
friends, but most of them were not so happy. The first few chapters are nice,
but after that the examples really become contrived. Instead of giving simple
standalone examples to explain a concept, the book starts using examples that
tend to linger. People get bored or stuck and stop around chapter 6 to 8.

I am hopeful that Learn You a Haskell will serve as a good introduction to
Haskell, and will recommend it to anyone interested.

RWH is still a fine book; once you understand Haskell, it's still great to go
through the examples and exercises. But it is not a good starting point.

~~~
T-R
It definitely gets a little tough around the Parser example, but it does
lighten up again once you get through the monad transformer section, though.

For someone who's done some functional programming before, Real World Haskell
is probably a good starting point; otherwise something like YAHT would
probably be better.

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jamesbritt
I'm using Ubuntu Maverick. The debs page
(<http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=haskell-platform>) has
2010.1.0.0.1.

How do I get 2011.2 for Maverick?

~~~
dons
You'll need to wait for your distro maintainer to update the package set.
Alternatively, you can build from source, using a generic Linux ghc, like so:

<http://www.vex.net/~trebla/haskell/haskell-platform.xhtml>

~~~
jamesbritt
Cool, thanks for the link.

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droz
Would be nice for the Haskell Platform to adopt a de facto IDE (e.g., Leksah)
that was compatible across the major OS platforms and distribute it along with
the other developer tools.

~~~
ionfish
When I download a compiler and the core libraries for a language, I don't want
to have to download an IDE with it—Haskell Platform downloads are generally
slow enough already, without adding something that really shouldn't be
considered part of the core functionality of a language.

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sgt
I love Haskell, it's incredibly powerful, fast and elegant. However, I
switched to Erlang because it's a heck of a lot easier to learn and it's
quicker to sit down with it and produce something tangible. While I struggled
to learn the concepts of Haskell, I immediately "clicked" with Erlang. I still
wish to look up Haskell again though, it's very intriguing.

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zmanian
Question?

I'm an ubuntu/xmonad user. I also do some occasional haskell coding. I've been
using the packaged versions of xmonad and the haskell platform thus far.

Are people building from source? Waiting for Natty? Using a ppa?

~~~
jmillikin
For most of my Haskell work, I just use the standard GHC package, with
libraries installed in clean environments using ``cabal-dev``. Compatibility
with Ubuntu-packaged libraries, such as xmonad or mtl, is too important to
trade away for a new GHC.

For testing against GHC 7, I built from source and installed to
~/.opt/ghc_7.0.1 -- over the next few days I'll probably grab 7.0.2 and
install in the same way. This is only for testing -- I don't built software
against it, generally.

Building GHC from source is actually _very_ easy -- just install the
development packages, then ./configure && make . There's instructions in the
GHC tarball.

~~~
zmanian
I'll probably follow this strategy. I'll wait for the entire package structure
to be revved in the next ubuntu release hopefully.

I'll run ghc7/cabal-dev from a portion of the home directory not in my path

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itsnotvalid
Actually you can install only needed packages from cabal using it as `cabal
install`.

Since it requires compiling the packages using either methods anyways.

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anonymousDan
Still no GUI programming support!

