[Haskell-cafe] Interesting new user perspective

[John Goerzen]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 10:35:05PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
> OTOH, it's easy to criticise what somebody else wrote. Much harder to  
> write something better yourself... :-/
>
> PS. I'm curios to see what happens when the book gets to the  
> "interesting stuff". The intro seems to promise that Haskell has  

I'm equally curious to see what happens when you get there ;-)

> libraries for all kinds of cool stuff - database access, sound, etc. But  
> IME it isn't true. I have tried and tried to make accessing a database  
> work from Haskell; the necessary libraries simply refuse to compile.  

Well, it compiles out of the box for me.  Which may or may not be
saying much.  Have you posted your compile errors here so that we can
help you?

> work.) I want to see what the hell everybody else is doing differently  
> that makes this stuff actually work for them when it fails miserably for 
> me!

Start by showing us what exact commands you're running and what errors
you get.  Also what version of GHC you have and your platform would be
helpful.

So anyhow... when I started using Haskell, it was *despite* the state
of libraries.  I found that I was so much more productive in Haskell
in the long run that I could sometimes write the library and solve the
original problem in less time than it took to just solve the original
problem in Python or OCaml.  Obviously this doesn't always hold.  But
this is part of the reason that I wrote HDBC, ConfigFile, MissingH,
hslogger, etc.  Small things that were just missing but aren't
anymore.

I can't pretend that the Haskell library set is as full-featured as, say,
Python.  But it *is* respectable and it most certainly holds its own
with database access.

Oh, and you can call Python from Haskell.

-- John