This article pretty well matches my own reaction to seeing the Neohaskell web site a few minutes earlier, from clicking a nearby HN post about it. Too much song and dance, too much Discord, not enough plain explanations instead of cute graphics, no convincing vision that any version of Haskell can be anything other than a language for nerds, and also no explanation of why we nerds shouldn't want to use a nerdy language that we can nerd with, instead of this weird attention seeking thing. Hipsters already have Ruby after all. Can't they just use it?<p>I even felt something like that about Yesod, so Gabriella's mention of Stack seemed apropos. In Yesod's case, the author (Michael Snoyman, also author of Stack) was at least an extremely knowledgeable and productive Haskeller, even if some of the decisions in Yesod came across as dubious for purists. Neohaskell has far less substance behind it.
My initial reaction to the first few excerpts from neohaskell's website was: "Wait?! Are you guys already forking Simple Haskell[1] before Simple Haskell even has any traction??"<p>In one hand neohaskell is not that dumb, but on the other hand it's not much better either. I believe that if you are going to make a claim that ambitious you need to post more than a website and a discord, you need an actual PoC.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.simplehaskell.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.simplehaskell.org/</a>
I think its great that someone is trying to make haskell not suck to use. Better still that its very ambitious as it means people will learn much if or when it doesn't meet its aspirations.
C++ is a giant language, it has accumulated sooo many features, so a small language can be cut out from it that offers a more concise set of features, may Zig is that language.<p>Perl same story. And Ruby may be that language that was cut out of Perl.<p>Haskell has a problem like that as well, and (while not a general purpose language) Elm is a neat, concise small language that's cut out of Haskell. As the author of this NeoHaskell commentary explains, I also do not see how NeoHaskell fits in here (epecially since it tries to be Haskell compatible).<p>-----<p>I also see the opposite, Java and Go for instance have a small feature set and miss ergonomics (and an std lib designed based on those ergonomics). Java recently got Kotlin, which seems to me a great "Java 2.0". Go may also benefit from a language that builds on top and provides great interop with the Go std lib and ecosystem.
I think there's a lot to be said for just ignoring projects that you aren't interested in or think are taking the wrong approach. This post is a mostly fair critique of the project, but it's just going to create a lot of pointless drama. There's no 'NeoHaskell' that anyone can download at the moment, so it's not as if newbies are going to be misled into downloading an experimental implementation instead of GHC.
Someone said that discussing footguns with haskellers is useless because they are so used to walking around with bleeding flesh wounds in their feet... I think it applies here. Those on the "inside" will never see what those on the "outside" see and thus why an ambitious outsider would start a project like this.
What is wrong with PureScript? It has strict evaluation and the Syntax is 99% similar to Haskell. It transpiles to JavaScript, C++, Erlang and Go. It runs easily in older browsers without wasm, and has access to huge amount of software libs through npm interop. Yet it seems to be used by very few.
Does anyone who prefers these types of languages have any thoughts on Idris? The ecosystem is small but the language seems to satisfy the Haskell use case without the language extension issue.
Anyone seeking to <i>become</i> a dictator, benevolent or not, shouldn't get the job.<p>FOSS has enough issues with people who were merely <i>anointed</i> dictators.
This is how I understand the whole heohaskell thing: some guy comes out of nowhere, spends some time picking fonts for neohaskell's website and then starts churning out github-tickets for this-is-what-a-better-haskell-is-supposed-to-look-like instead of actually doing stuff :)