The tooling situation has rapidly improved in my opinion, nowadays ghcide [0] (a language server implementation) is really great and easy to set up.
I really do hope that not too many people feel like the message is "keep out". In recent years the community has generally strived to be welcoming to beginners and share the excitment of learning Haskell, without the arrogance.
The aforementioned tooling improvements were only possible because a bunch of excellent people did exactly what you mention: tackle everyday productivity and pleasantness by improving IDE integration deep into the stack, all the way to the information the compiler makes available to the tooling.
If you want to get a fresh impression, ZuriHac [1] is happening (remotely) this weekend, and there is an online class for absolute beginners held by the excellent Julie Moronuki (of haskellbook.com fame).
Disclaimer: I'm very biased, because I'm a co-organizer, but I think it will be great fun!
Honestly, I tried to set up ghcide because I would love to have a good ide for Haskell but stopped because the setup procedure is not easy at all. Or maybe I'm getting something completely wrong?
On the link you are giving, there are the following steps:
- clone a git repo
- run cabal install
- test that ghcide is able to load your code (!)
Quote: "If it doesn't work, see the hie-bios manual to get it working."
- finally integrate it in the ide that you are currently using.
I am using IntelliJ IDE with the Haskell plugin and apparently I am out of luck because it is not listed.
> finally integrate it in the ide that you are currently using. I am using IntelliJ IDE with the Haskell plugin and apparently I am out of luck because it is not listed.
Well, is it an IDE that supports LSP? If so, it should just work. If not, then ghcide won't work with it. Providing a language server is the whole point of what it does!
There is a LSP plugin for IntelliJ but it is not very stable.
But that was not my point: maybe I'm spoiled because I'm coming from the JVM universe, but I don't agree that ghcide installation is easy.
For me, "easy" means running an installer or invoking homebrew, and continue being productive.
I really do hope that not too many people feel like the message is "keep out". In recent years the community has generally strived to be welcoming to beginners and share the excitment of learning Haskell, without the arrogance.
The aforementioned tooling improvements were only possible because a bunch of excellent people did exactly what you mention: tackle everyday productivity and pleasantness by improving IDE integration deep into the stack, all the way to the information the compiler makes available to the tooling.
If you want to get a fresh impression, ZuriHac [1] is happening (remotely) this weekend, and there is an online class for absolute beginners held by the excellent Julie Moronuki (of haskellbook.com fame).
Disclaimer: I'm very biased, because I'm a co-organizer, but I think it will be great fun!
[0]: https://github.com/digital-asset/ghcide
[1]: https://zurihac.com