[Haskell-cafe] IDE?

[David House]

Andrew Coppin writes:
 > > Why not contribute an afternoon's hacking?
 > >   
 > 
 > 1. I'm not good enough.

How do you intend to remedy that, apart from by writing Haskell code? Start
small, fix small typos or bugs, and build it up from there. Seriously, just give
it a go, I doubt any of your patches will be rejected out of hand. Rather,
you'll get comments on your coding style which will help you become a better
programmer. 

 > Personally, I really hate text-mode editors. (I won't even go into how
 > many times I've had to reboot Linux just to get *out* of Vi!)

'Z Z' is the command to quit vi, right?

 > What I would *really* like is a nice big IDE... but it seems there isn't
 > one for Haskell. :-(

This was my attitude, too, for a long time when I started to learn Haskell. I'd
only heard that Emacs was hard to get used to, hard to use, and somewhat
old-fashioned. Seeing as there was nothing better, I decided to spend a weekend
learning Emacs and count it as a life skill, as my productivity was sure to
increase. What did I find out? Well, the first of those complaints is true,
there's no doubting that, but the second isn't really and the third most
certainly not. It might not be the most conformist of editors but that doesn't
make it old-fashioned, nor arcane, nor irrelevant.

Give it a go. Start out with the Emacs tutorial [1] so that you have your feet
on solid ground, then jump to the Emacs tour [2] to whet your appetite to the
breadths of features that Emacs provides.

[1]: Use C-h t (hold Ctrl, press h, then let go of both and press t) inside
Emacs
[2]: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

-- 
-David House, dmhouse at gmail.com