[Haskell] Haskell alternatives: functional programming in rich IDEs

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi Bulat,

> 1) F#, is Ocaml dialect integrated in .NET environment
> 2) Clean, very Haskell-like language with a commercial IDE, GUI libs and so on
> 3) Business Objects, integration of Haskell-like language into Java
> environment, http://labs.businessobjects.com/cal

I use WinHugs, and it suits my style of working better than many of
these IDE's when teamed with TextPad. Admitedly this has a large
amount to do with me rewriting WinHugs to support me, but I think its
a useful model for people who want a development environment.

GuiHaskell will be even closer to my perfect integrated environment.
Again, not a coincidence.

Haskell is not as good for IDE integration, C# is because it has lots
of redundancy, lots of long names etc. Haskell might be if qualified
imports were used more, but typically the code is already short, so
having an IDE type some of it for you is impractical without adding
language redundancy. Maybe automatic type notes would help a bit, but
again, I'm not convinced of their value.

I use Visual Studio for C#, and it's great. Really, this is how a
debugger should integrate with a code editor, the Haskell community
has nothing that can rival the C# debugger, but should be working on
this.

I have used the Clean development environment, it felt like a clunky
text editor. I was not very impressed, if I had taken time to learn
its features, I may have felt more at home - but thats not what I do.
Visual Studio is intuative, Clean was not.

I really like my IDE's, using WinHugs I do not long for the return of an IDE.

Thanks

Neil