> we bumped hard into a lot of the typical ecosystem problems
I think those are the things we really wanted to hear from you about!
I'm actively working on improving the Haskell ecosystem. I'm aware of a lot of "typical ecosystem problems" that cause challenges for onboarding of new Haskell users but I'm not actually aware of many problems for users who are onboarding and generally successfully using Haskell. I suppose general tool cruftiness might be one of those but I think it's a much bigger problem for new users than experienced users.
If you could mention the problems you ran up against I would appreciate it.
- Tool chain issues. Similar to the blog Nzen posted in a comment here, upgrading compilers could be a pain if breaking changes were introduced
- Poor ecosystem fit for an enterprise environment. We weren't willing to write libraries for some of the things we needed to support: DB2 access, SOAP, etc. Ended up writing C# wrapper services for a lot of that early on
- Poor library ecosystem in some cases. What felt like a good choice would be unsupported a year later
- Perhaps our own fault for committing to using Reflex for a heavyweight frontend. The team did an amazing job, but supporting GHCJS, the tooling around it, and trying to get faster dev iterations became a huge drag on the team
- Indirectly had to support it due to Reflex, but Nix. It's another rabbit hole that requires collective interest and a willingness to peel back the layers to make things work. Was another drag on the team
At the end of the day I'd say the biggest problem was cultural. I firmly believe that in order to have a successful Haskell environment, you need devs committed to the language and would label themselves "Haskellers". My team learned it and became expert engineers, but they are by no means Haskell language pros who thoroughly understand the inside outs of the language and its myriad of extensions. It's just a tool to them and they only used as much as they needed to.
There's a journal [0] on infinitenegativeutility, discussed here 40 days ago, with a section called "What pushed me away from Haskell?". That author points at issues that are primarily cultural. One example is a relaxed attitude toward backward compatibility from the GHC team.
If I grab an old Haskell project, even one without any external dependencies, I can often safely assume that it won't build any more with any recent version of GHC because everything has been changed just a little tiny bit.
That's an issue that would more affect experienced/long-term users than newcomers to haskell. I haven't used it myself. I'm just pointing at one person's perspective - someone who professes to still like Haskell - about why it's no longer a first choice.
I think those are the things we really wanted to hear from you about!
I'm actively working on improving the Haskell ecosystem. I'm aware of a lot of "typical ecosystem problems" that cause challenges for onboarding of new Haskell users but I'm not actually aware of many problems for users who are onboarding and generally successfully using Haskell. I suppose general tool cruftiness might be one of those but I think it's a much bigger problem for new users than experienced users.
If you could mention the problems you ran up against I would appreciate it.