[Haskell-cafe] Hugs

[Chris Smith]

I suspect this wouldn't actually address too many of these concerns.
Perhaps it would work for Eric's case, where he's willing to use Hugs,
which is definitely not a realistic development tool anyway.  Outside of
that, I think it's a bit revisionist to cast concerns about recent language
development as being about wanting a teaching sublanguage for new
programmers.  A lot of the rest of the concern is actually people's belief
that Haskell is becoming too complex to be the right trade-off for
general-purpose software development.  New programmers are mentioned
because some percentage of a realistic software engineering setting is
*always* made up of new programmers, and programmers who are new to the
tools or language.  That isn't addressed by adding teaching modes; you
can't partition off your coworkers and relegate them to the teaching
dialect.

For what it's worth, it's already not too hard to build simplified dialects
of Haskell for teaching.  I did it with http://code.world, and ran into few
problems despite some big changes.  In my view, it doesn't matter much if
there's a single short directive to make it work with the ghc command
line.  There are plenty of other advantages to wrapping GHC for education.
Once you've crossed the gulf from "the Haskell that everyone uses" to
"special island only for teaching new programmers", you've already lost the
benefits of living in the core Haskell ecosystem, and it no longer matters
if you add a few differences here and there.

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 5:35 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 2:57 AM, Johannes Waldmann <
> johannes.waldmann at htwk-leipzig.de> wrote:
>
>> > https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/652834731806052352
>>
>> This mentions    and :: Foldable t => t Bool -> Bool
>> as an example of "abstract nonsense".
>>
>>
> I find it sad... that people like Erik Meijer, Mark Lentczer... (even Doug
> McIllroy recently demonstrated that there are 2⁹⁹ dialects of haskell!!)
> are not being heeded
> And this complaint could be greatly alleviated with one little leaf drawn
> from racket -- language-packs: teachpacks
> <https://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/extending-drracket.html>
> Along with the single lightweight directive #lang
> <https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Module_Syntax.html#%28part._hash-lang%29>
>
> It may naturally be asked how is #lang different from ghc's language "-X"
> options
> A teachpack would be a bunch of coherent -X options maybe along with a
> suitable prelude
>
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