Haskell for Mac IDE

by philonoist • 9 years ago

254 65 9 years ago

nerdponx• 9 years ago

This is just what I needed. I love Vim and Emacs for daily work, but a good IDE is a fantastic learning tool. Looking forward to trying it!

AJRF• 9 years ago

This looks awesome. On Friday I started going through "learn you a Haskell" and absolutely love the languages expressiveness and syntax.

One thing that ticked me off a bit was that the package manager and build system (cabal and stack) were a bit incomprehensible to me, hopefully this packages everything up nicely.

Indentation is a bit confusing in Haskell too, but this IDE has built in support for linting indentation.

adamnemecek2• 9 years ago

Yeah I always get stuck on cabal and stack.

3131s2• 9 years ago

I tried out Yesod and Snap a while back and while the frameworks themselves were pleasant to work with from what I could tell, I spent whole days messing with package management issues that would render my projects unrunnable after new installs. I couldn't see myself working with Haskell in production for a web project until that situation improves.

Buttons840• 9 years ago

Stack is the easier of the two, that may change with future cabal-install releases. Probably the hardest part is getting the cabal file setup correctly.

andrewcarter• 9 years ago

Funny that this would pop up, I just found it and bought it last week! I've been playing with Haskell recently and this app is perfect for playing with example code that you'll read in articles and books while learning.

Another awesome resource is Hoogle https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/ It's super handy if you already have programming experience and are looking for a function that does a particular thing but you don't know what it's called. You can just put the type signature of what you want in the search box and it gives you back functions that'll do it!

runeks2• 9 years ago

Another awesome resource is Hoogle https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/ It's super handy if you already have programming experience and are looking for a function that does a particular thing but you don't know what it's called.

Agreed. There's also Stackage's Hoogle, which will search through a ton of libraries as well (e.g. aeson, for JSON parsing): https://www.stackage.org/lts-7.24/hoogle

lachenmayer• 9 years ago

re. Hoogle, also check out Hayoo http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/ which adds a couple of nice features like typeahead & a 'view source' button.

runeks2• 9 years ago

I use IntelliJ IDEA with the intellij-haskell plugin, which works to some extent, but is fairly slow -- not the least at startup, which can easily take five minutes.

I'm afraid I won't be trying out this IDE, however, unless they offer a trial period (which I can't spot anywhere on the page). $30 isn't too much for a good IDE, but I'd like to try it out before paying in full, particularly since it seems to reinvent the IDE from the ground up, which makes me suspect a lot of the extra functionality, that more mature IDEs have, is missing.

pthreads• 9 years ago

At the very bottom they have a link for the trial version (http://store.haskellformac.com/)

amatecha2• 9 years ago

Yeah, I'm using IntelliJ IDEA with intellij-haskell plugin as well! Works quite nicely, but my work is pretty trivial at the moment, so I'm not sure how it will hold up for something a bit more complicated. We shall see..!

emilypi2• 9 years ago

The IDE has great potential, and I've used it extensively for sandboxed and mini projects, but it's still not mature enough to replace any of the editors I'm already using (and I think they know that over at HfM).

I'm definitely keeping an eye on it, and once they come up with better pre-existing project support, and possibly git integration, it will most definitely be a candidate for replacing atom or Emacs for me. The feel of it is just fantastic.

indy• 9 years ago

Out of curiosity, did you use the Intero package with Emacs? (https://commercialhaskell.github.io/intero/).

emilypi2• 9 years ago

I haven't, but I'll definitely give it a look!

chowells• 9 years ago

Also consider Dante https://github.com/jyp/dante instead of Intero. Similar (not identical, see the README for a quick overview) feature set, doesn't require stack.

mlevental3• 9 years ago

i know this is a haskell thread but after trying to grok haskell for years (yes i understand monads) i've discovered F# and jesus christ what a dramatic difference in functional language ergonomics and tooling and ecosystem. it has everything that haskell does (ADTs, type inference, immutability [when you want it], lazy [or eager] eval, pattern matching/destructuring, expression based, and partial application/curried functions) but it doesn't handcuff you to pure (side-effect free) code. say what you want but often writing code in haskell is monad acrobatics because you can't write a simple for loop or do i/o. the tooling is fantastic and cross platform (visual studio/xamarin) with a real debugger, real breakpoints, lightyears better docs, readable compiler errors, enormous ecosystem by way of interop with c# libraries. it's an eminently practical functional language. the `F# for fun and profit` series of blogposts is fantastic for not only introducing the language but explaining the value proposition of functional patterns. of course i wish ocaml had the same advantages (and it does have many) since it compiles to native binary but i'll accept the CLI in exchange for all the tooling benefits.

bad_user• 9 years ago

On Hacker News I've noticed people read titles, then go to the comments section to dump whatever thought is on their minds, triggered by certain keywords like some game I used to play as a child, as an excuse to get something off their chest.

It's very rude to pimp on other people's projects and articles to get something off your chest though.

This article is not primarily about Haskell, but about a commercial IDE made by a guy named Manuel M T Chakravarty — which for me it's interesting, because it's an example of somebody that apparently makes something that he likes, helping an ecosystem and people give him money for it. So it's perfectly on topic for Hacker News and visitors of the comments section like myself, would like to see opinions related to this project.

As for the comment, F# is a fine language, but reading the comparison I'm fairly certain that you haven't learned Haskell and I say this in order to help you — learning Haskell is the easiest path to practicing FP, which given your comment I'm fairly certain you don't grok yet, which keeps you back from being a good F# developer as well.

That you haven't learned Haskell is more of a failure of Haskell's community — but there have been recent projects trying to address that. One is the Haskell for Mac project here in TFA, others are the Stack build tool and http://haskellbook.com, a really good book meant for beginners.

hellofunk• 9 years ago

Haskell is the easiest path to practicing FP

Have to disagree here. Haskell is good for learning about advanced type systems along with FP.

But for the "easiest" path to just learning FP, Scheme, SML, even Clojure are far more approachable.

mlevental3• 9 years ago

It's very rude to pimp on other people's projects and articles to get something off your chest though.

this isn't a refereed journal - you can't prescribe how people engage with the material. i was prompted to post what i did on the back of having experimented with every ide-ish thing for haskell out there about 6 months ago (this one included).

As for the comment, F# is a fine language, but reading the comparison I'm fairly certain that you haven't learned Haskell and I say this in order to help you

not only is this patronizing but it commits the fallacy of begging the question - i did learn haskell while working on a fairly sizable codebase at my last job. i won't reiterate all of my complaints here (i've posted several times to r/haskell) but the tooling sucks and pure code is a set of handcuffs - golden handcuffs maybe but handcuffs nonetheless. that we disagree on whether pure code is the one true god does not mean i don't understand fp - it means just that, that i disagree! to conclude from my disagreement with you that i don't understand fp begs the question (petitio principii) of whether pure code is the one true god.

That you haven't learned Haskell is more of a failure of Haskell's community — but there have been recent projects trying to address that. One is the Haskell for Mac project here in TFA, others are the Stack build tool and http://haskellbook.com, a really good book meant for beginners.

i read the haskell book and learnyouahaskell and real world haskell and many many tutorials and wrestled with stack and cabal. certainly they're better than the tools/resources available for e.g. cobol but they do not compare to the ecosystem around other, much more welcoming languages.

comment1053• 9 years ago

helping an ecosystem

If it were open source, yeah definitely. But is this app written entirely in Haskell? I don't think so, otherwise it would at least be a good Haskell promotion.

sriku• 9 years ago

a commercial IDE made by a guy named Manuel M T Chakravarty

He's not just "a guy". Check out http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/ . He's an old timer in the field.

kccqzy2• 9 years ago

If you think writing code in haskell is monad acrobatics, you don’t grok monads.

mlevental3• 9 years ago

alternatively if you think writing haskell isn't monad acrobatics then you haven't written i/o heavy code.

danidiaz• 9 years ago

you can't write a simple for loop or do i/o.

You can often use the "for" function for things analogous to effectful imperative loops. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.10.0.0/docs/Data-T...

PhineasRex• 9 years ago

you can't write a simple for loop or do i/o

  for [1..10] 
      print

Trivially refuted.

mark_l_watson• 9 years ago

I bought this last year. Nice product. I usually use Emaces but the IDE works nicely for small bits of code and live programming.

comment1053• 9 years ago

Learn Functional Programming with Haskell

Why would I pay $30? I can learn and use Haskell for $0.

This feels like a typical mac os thing, pay for everything.

aetherspawn• 9 years ago

You pay for good software, and a lot of Mac OS software is not just good, but great.

I didn’t bat an eyelid when I bought Little Snitch, Alfred, Parallels, et al. and from the screenshots this looks like a nicely polished piece of software.

comment1053• 9 years ago

You pay for good software

Hmmm, I don't like that statement.

"Great software" is very subjective. I think linux is a great piece of software. I use a macbook for the great hardware but certainly not for the software! Apart from Sublime text all apps I use are free, including hundreds of CLI apps.

vortico2• 9 years ago

Why would I pay $30?

If you think the benefit of using the software is $30 or greater, like anything else in the world.

Szel• 9 years ago

Anybody knows some nice IDE on Windows? Or is programming on Windows even worthwhile?

icc97• 9 years ago

I got Haskell + Emacs + Intero working on Windows [0]

[0] https://ianchanning.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/installing-hask...

donovanm2• 9 years ago

I've gotten vscode working well on Windows with the haskero plugin. You'll need to install stack for this to work correctly.

saagarjha• 9 years ago

Haskell for Mac integrates Apple’s SpriteKit game engine including animations & physics.

Interesting. How is this done? Is there a Haskell-style interface provided, or is it a thin veneer over the Objective-C API?

jfoutz2• 9 years ago

http://support.hfm.io/1.5/api/spritekit-0.9.0.2/Graphics-Spr...

agentultra• 9 years ago

I really like that it has SpriteKit integration but there are more practical, work-a-day framework bindings that would have sold me. The ideal world a Haskell IDE for Mac inspires is one in which I can build native macOS applications in Haskell. I hope it's on the radar.

vortico2• 9 years ago

The code examples in the five screenshots on the homepage are some of the first real-world use cases I've seen of "real" Haskell. It gives the impression of Haskell as a practical language other than an idealized clean-room experiment, so kudos to whoever wrote those!

signal11• 9 years ago

IIRC Haskell for Mac was created by @tacticalgrace who's an Australian CS professor: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/

No idea if he created the demos though.

amatecha2• 9 years ago

I finally updated to OS X Yosemite (10.10) and went to buy this app as I had been intending to once I updated, but unfortunately since I made those plans, Haskell for Mac now requires an even newer version of OS X :( Unfortunate... I'll have to stick with IntelliJ IDEA for now -- no plans to ever "upgrade" beyond Yosemite unless absolutely necessary.

eicossa• 9 years ago

Why don't you want to upgrade beyond Yosemite ? I just bought a new Macbook Air and its been nagging me to update.

Learn2win• 9 years ago

HfM is great to play with and learn Haskell. For a real project, I use Haskell Vim IDE.

Haskell for Mac IDE

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