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Haskell for Mac

Available here with hackernews and reddit discussions ongoing.

Even though I'm not a big fan of Haskell, I'm pretty excited about this. It represents a trend where PL is finally taking holistic programmer experiences seriously, and a move toward interactivity in program development that takes advantage of our (a) rich type systems, and (b) increasing budget of computer cycles. Even that they are trying to sell this is good: if people can get used to paying for tooling, that will encourage even more tooling via a healthy market feedback loop. The only drawback is the MAS sandbox, app stores need to learn how to accept developer tools without crippling them.

By Sean McDirmid at 2015-08-25 23:13 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 21720 reads

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Like many on HN I fail to

Like many on HN I fail to see what paying for this really buys you. It's basically a sandboxed (== crippled) IDE. But it's nice to see a Haskell environment getting this much attention.

Full disclosure: I never liked IDEs.

By Ehud Lamm at Tue, 2015-08-25 23:35 | login or register to post comments

Money buys you future

Money buys you future progress.

The PL academic community will eventually have to come to terms with IDEs, or face becoming irrelevant. The computer is there, it should do things for you...not just run the programs that you carefully developed in your head (Full disclosure: I'm obviously biased).

By Sean McDirmid at Wed, 2015-08-26 00:03 | login or register to post comments

I am not against paying. In

I am not against paying. In fact it wasn't even that I prefer emacs. What I really should have said more clearly is that the website doesn't make the raison d'être clear (some people call this the value proposition).

By Ehud Lamm at Wed, 2015-08-26 00:07 | login or register to post comments

Understood. The value

Understood. The value proposition is clearly put, I think:

Haskell for Mac is an easy-to-use integrated programming environment for the functional programming language Haskell. It features interactive Haskell playgrounds to explore and experiment with code. It is ideal to learn functional programming, prototype Haskell code, interactively visualize data, and to create interactive animations.

The rest of the points just elaborate, I think they did a decent job in explaining their work, much better than similar efforts.

By Sean McDirmid at Wed, 2015-08-26 00:35 | login or register to post comments

I'm not sure if it's

I'm not sure if it's supposed to be more like BlueJ or more like IPython.

By Ehud Lamm at Wed, 2015-08-26 16:38 | login or register to post comments

Neither, it is obviously

Neither, it is obviously going after playground.

By Sean McDirmid at Wed, 2015-08-26 21:36 | login or register to post comments

If I only knew what that

If I only knew what that was...

By Ehud Lamm at Wed, 2015-08-26 22:25 | login or register to post comments

I think that is the context

I think that is the context that is missing. We tend to compare experiences with the ones that we are familiar with, and if we see N + 1, but missed N, it can be confusing.

Playground is just a REPL embellished with graphical capabilities, this is pretty much the same. It is not oriented in the iPython direction, though they are both embellished in graphics and are based on REPLs. Take the three features marketed on the web page, and that's about it...it doesn't have much of a overarching purpose like iPython does, it is just those three features (Playground is basically the same).

By Sean McDirmid at Wed, 2015-08-26 23:11 | login or register to post comments

Two Haskell for Macs?

So what is the relationship between Haskell for Mac OS X - free, non-sandboxed and available as as X-Code project to rebuild as a native app, and Haskell for Mac $25, sandboxed, closed source?

By Andrew Moss at Wed, 2015-08-26 08:41 | login or register to post comments

Only the latter is an IDE

However, the former links to http://www.kronosnotebook.com/haskell, which also looks IDE-ish.

By Blaisorblade at Wed, 2015-08-26 13:20 | login or register to post comments