[Haskell-cafe] Poor first impression

[Spencer Janssen]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 06:28:48 -0300
"Fernando Cassia" <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:

> I admit in shame never having heard about Haskell before. I know
> about PHP, Python, IBM' s REXX, TCL, TCL/TK, perl... but Haskell,
> never.
> 
> So, here's how I landed in Haskell-land: I was looking for a simple
> ncurses-based text mode mp3 player with some sort of basic GUI and
> found "HMP3" written in, you guessed it, Haskell.
> 
> So I follow the directions and download the huge 30MB+
> ghc-6.6.1-i386-unknown-linux.tar.bz2. Bunzip2 it. tar xvf
> it. ./configure and "make install". So far, so good.
> and I get the following message, supposedly telling me that the
> haskell compiler was installed OK...
> =======================================================================
> Installation of ghc-6.6.1 was successful.
> 
> To use, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH.
> 
> For documentation, see /usr/local/share/ghc-6.6.1/html/index.html
> =======================================================================
> (/usr/local/bin is already in my path)
> 
> So I decide to call the ghc compiler with no arguments to see if it
> was indeed installed, and I get this:
> 
> [root at localhost ghc-6.6.1]# ghc
> /usr/local/lib/ghc-6.6.1/ghc-6.6.1: error while loading shared
> libraries: libreadline.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such
> file or directory #

Yes, that is a bit annoying.  The readline issues are mentioned on the
download page though -- you were warned ;).  GHC 6.6.1 is only a day
old, so there aren't very many binary builds available.  On the other
hand, GHC 6.6 has RPMs for FC5:

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_66.html#x86linux

> So, I conclude that Haskell is not ready for prime time, if it cannot
> install itself correclty including shared libs in a standard Fedora
> Core 6 system.

Please don't make generalizations from a single experience with a
compiler version that is less than a day old.

> Goodbye Haskell, I just wanted to compile a MP3 player, and perhaps
> if the compiler installed OK with no issues, I'd have taken a look at
> the language. But as of right now, I don't have time to waste with
> broken compiler installers.
> 
> Byebye
> FC


Cheers,
Spencer Janssen