In fact of all the points I was raising, only the first was about the core language. It's more the ecosystem and some cultural aspects that bothered me. To take a symmetrical example, JavaScript has great tooling and community despite being a language with countless flaws.
Over the years, Python and Ruby ecosystem have gotten pretty OK. Go, Clojure and Elixir are younger and have learned from previous languages, their tooling is not as extensive but they're starting on firmer ground. I'm not sure how to define what makes a well polished software development environment, it's a good question really. I suppose one could write books about subject. But Haskell gave me a fuzzy feeling that things were cumbersome and sometimes buggy. Package management was the show stopper for me. I'm glad Haskell exists and people enjoy coding in it but for me after a while it wasn't that fun so I went to do other things. My arguments are shallow and are more like opinions, but if you care to spread Haskell usage, maybe you can hear them nonetheless.
>> I was disappointed because I was attracted by referential integrity, strong compiler checks, pattern matching and function composition
> Those are many of the reasons I was attracted to Haskell and still use it today, are you claiming Haskell doesn't have those things?
No sorry I phrased that bad. It think Haskell has those things.
I just want to help myself and everyone to have the right information so we can all make the best decisions for ourselves ;)
I get the feeling and I've had it before as well, mostly due to cabal hell. I've found it to be the biggest culprit of making the entire language buggy, but now that I'm using nixos for example I don't feel it anymore.
I can't expect everyone that wants to use haskell to switch to using a different package manager I guess, but I also hear that Halcyon and Haskell LTS (from stackage) solve this problem.
As for the future, I believe this will be the solution until other (partial?) solutions in the works such as backpack (ML like module system) are finished.
In fact of all the points I was raising, only the first was about the core language. It's more the ecosystem and some cultural aspects that bothered me. To take a symmetrical example, JavaScript has great tooling and community despite being a language with countless flaws. Over the years, Python and Ruby ecosystem have gotten pretty OK. Go, Clojure and Elixir are younger and have learned from previous languages, their tooling is not as extensive but they're starting on firmer ground. I'm not sure how to define what makes a well polished software development environment, it's a good question really. I suppose one could write books about subject. But Haskell gave me a fuzzy feeling that things were cumbersome and sometimes buggy. Package management was the show stopper for me. I'm glad Haskell exists and people enjoy coding in it but for me after a while it wasn't that fun so I went to do other things. My arguments are shallow and are more like opinions, but if you care to spread Haskell usage, maybe you can hear them nonetheless.
>> I was disappointed because I was attracted by referential integrity, strong compiler checks, pattern matching and function composition > Those are many of the reasons I was attracted to Haskell and still use it today, are you claiming Haskell doesn't have those things?
No sorry I phrased that bad. It think Haskell has those things.