I've been using ledger (the original one) for the last couple of months, and I'm loving it. I'm way into the whole plain text accounting thing.
I guess it's the most obvious question in the world, but: what are the big reasons I should switch to hledger? What do you see as the primary advantages of hledger over ledger?
As hledger's proud parent, having preferred it for my needs since the early releases, I can talk about this for a long time. :)
The https://hledger.org/FAQ addresses it, as PhilippGille mentioned. I still find it hard to answer concisely.
Let me give it another shot:
Here are some things I've tried to do differently with hledger compared to Ledger. I feel we've had some success with all of these:
Project:
- be actively maintained and contributed to
- build out Ledger's concepts a bit more selectively/thoroughly/to a higher level of polish,
taking advantage of hindsight, a fresh codebase, a well-suited language
Docs & design:
- all behaviour fully specified and documented
- all docs up to date and accurate
- practice documentation-first design and development
- more intuitive, learnable, consistent concepts and UX
- be usable for less-technical users as well as techies
- be easy to get started with as well as efficient for regular use
- explicitly try to model accounting concepts and help meet real world accounting needs
Software:
- be robust and dependable, with few user-visible bugs
- be easy to install and run well on all major platforms
- provide APIs/libs enabling more plain text accounting hacking among Haskellers
- be readable, clear, and a useful source of algorithm & architecture ideas for other implementors
- remain maintainable and cost effective over the long term
- achieve a long lifespan and provide a safe long term format for accounting data
Technology:
- clarify whether Haskell is good for real-world apps (yes!)
- learn more Haskell by building a real-world app (yes!)
- attract contributors by being a Haskell project (yes)
Out of time for now, I hope it's not too hand-wavy..
Good point. By "user-visible" I mean "any real problem a user could recognise if it was pointed out to them". Such as a wrong sign, wrong decimal digit, or behaviour not agreeing with the docs.
I guess it's the most obvious question in the world, but: what are the big reasons I should switch to hledger? What do you see as the primary advantages of hledger over ledger?