[Haskell-cafe] What features should an (fictitious) IDE for Haskell have?

[Andrew Butterfield]

That's an `iterate (+1)` from me!

I've just finished teaching my students about monads, and this facility would be really, really, useful....
(They're now engaged in a struggle with a monadic exercise ;-)

Regards,
  Andrew

> On 7 Dec 2020, at 23:22, André Popovitch <andre at popovit.ch> wrote:
> 
> One feature I've always wanted would be able to "manually inline" a function. For example, if I have
> 
>     foo a = a + a
>     bar = foo 3
> 
> I'd like to be able to right-click on the invocation of `foo` and select some option to inline it, rewriting the file to read 
> 
>     foo a = a + a
>     bar = 3 + 3
> 
> I think this would make it simple to dive into an abstraction to see what's really going on. For example, imagine a new user is confused by this expression:
>  
>    Just 3 >> Just 4
> 
> They could right-click on `>>` to see that it is identical to:
> 
>     case Just 3 of
>         Just _ -> Just 4
>         Nothing -> Nothing
> 
> 
> Which would allow them to easily see that this expression will always evaluate to "Just 4" (and hopefully simplify it). Enlightened, they could then hit ctrl-z to revert the code to its original state. 
> 
> Haskell's purity and laziness makes it one of the only mainstream languages where equational reasoning is really possible, so this feature would play on Haskell's strengths and provide a feature that couldn't be replicated in other languages' IDEs. It would also allow new users to more easily dive in and understand certain abstractions (although how it would work in many cases would be hard to determine).
> 
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 3:35 PM Gueven Bay via Haskell-Cafe <haskell-cafe at haskell.org <mailto:haskell-cafe at haskell.org>> wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> Imagine that you can decide what functionality and features an
> Integrated Development Environment for Haskell should get. You can
> make this IDE with your wishlist similar in power as other IDEs for
> Java for example.
> 
> Now list as many features as you can, what would make the life of a
> Haskell developer as comfortable as possible!?
> 
> I am dying to know how this list of features at the end (of this
> thread) will look like.
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> 
> -- 
> Andre Popovitch
> 989 627 4376
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Andrew Butterfield     Tel: +353-1-896-2517     Fax: +353-1-677-2204
Lero at TCD, Head of Software Foundations & Verification Research Group
School of Computer Science and Statistics,
Room G.39, O'Reilly Institute, Trinity College, University of Dublin
                         http://www.scss.tcd.ie/Andrew.Butterfield/
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