[Haskell-community] Downloads page & Haskell for Mac

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Gershom B <gershomb at gmail.com>:
> 
> Hiya Manuel.
> 
> So the plan was, and I guess still should be, that we were going to
> have a second discussion on "other download methods" at the bottom of
> the downloads page, and how to handle listing all sorts of various
> other things. For example, Haskell for Mac, Kronos IHaskell Notebook,
> Halcyon, Nix, the fact that one can run Haskell for free over Sage
> Math Cloud. Also there is the question of if we should link to some
> place that documents IDEs more too, since often people consider these
> days IDEs the third critical component of a language along with the
> way to compile things and the way to manage additional libraries.
> 
> Anyway, people got busy and we didn't kick off this "other download
> methods" portion of the discussion in a very timely fashion, so thanks
> for the push.
> 
> One question I have is about Haskell for Mac itself. Given appstore
> restrictions, it sort of has a dual character. I suppose my question
> is, ultimately, do you see it more as a "way to download haskell" or
> an "amazing development environment for haskell" (that ultimately has
> to provide a bundled compiler because of App Store issues).

Actually, both :)

Let me share a little story that was part of the motivation for developing Haskell for Mac. The last few summers, I’ve started teaching my (now 11yro) son Haskell. The year before last, he asked me whether some of his friends could join in. In the end, I had six 9-10yros who I wanted to teach Haskell. They all brought their own (or rather parent’s) MacBooks and on our first session I asked the parents to stay around at the start, so they could enter admin passwords, while I tried to get everybody up and running with Haskell and a text editor on their laptops. It was a mess and took much longer than I had planned. (And I have been installing GHC since it was version 0.16, I believe.)

Then, I had the kids use the usual mixture of text editor, command line, and ghci, which works, but was a significant distraction and cognitive burden on top of trying to teach them a bit of programming.

This was the point where I decided that the status quo is ridiculous and that there are two major problems: (1) difficulty of installation of the toolchain and (2) difficulty of use of the toolchain.

Haskell for Mac addresses both. Hence, it bundles the compiler and libraries on purpose, not because of the rules of the App Store. It is actually the other way around. I knew that I wanted to bundle everything, which led me to the idea of distributing through the App Store. 

Hence, a major purpose of Haskell for Mac is to serve as a Haskell distribution. This is why I believe it belongs on the downloads page. 

Manuel

PS: BTW, this is exactly what Apple does with Xcode, too. Xcode bundles the compilers and tools and you get the IDE and toolchain in one App Store download. To the user, this is the most convenient option.