Sunday, June 30, 2013

EclipseFP 2.5.3 released

Hello, I've just released a new version of EclipseFP, 2.5.3. This is a minor release for bug fixes, general stability and hopefully better performance.

You can find the release notes here: https://raw.github.com/JPMoresmau/eclipsefp/master/docs/releasenotes/net.sf.eclipsefp.haskell_2.5.3.txt.

I don't have a lot of time for EclipseFP at the moment, being busy on other projects, but I'm well aware that there are a few enhancements that people have asked for in the queue. I'll try to address these later on, and of course I'll happily accept pull request on https://github.com/JPMoresmau/eclipsefp.

As usual install or update by pointing your Eclipse to http://eclipsefp.sf.net/updates.

Happy Haskell Hacking!

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Eclipse Hate and Haskell IDEs

A few weeks ago I was reading the comments about the release of Android Studio on reddit. I was a bit shocked by all the Eclipse hate. But hey, I suppose I use Eclipse and not IntelliJ, so I don't know what I'm missing and how great it would be to work on IDEA. But then I was surprised to see that there has been no release of ideah, the Haskell plug-in for IDEA, for a year and a half. How come there isn't more momentum if IntelliJ is such a great IDE to build on and work with?

Maybe we're just suffering from too much dispersion in the Haskell IDE space. We have plug-ins for the major IDEs, but none of them can probably called great (I know, some people positively hate EclipseFP, but for my defence I'll say I get much more bug reports and feature requests than pull requests, I probably need a course on "building a passionate programming community around your open source project"). They however have the massive advantage of being able to reuse a wealth of existing code (I can use the Eclipse Git plugin to work with Github, I don't need somebody to write the Haskell version). An IDE in Haskell like Leksah or something built on top of Yi would be amazing to showcase that you can do real applications in Haskell (since you still get people saying that Haskell is only for toying with), but then you need to build everything, which requires people (see note above on building a community). Then we have web based editors like the offering from FPComplete, but for developers to use them on real projects we need to think on how to package a web based interface and what it means for a development work-flow: I'm not sure developers would embrace developing using a browser. Of course we have plug-ins for the Unixy editors, emacs and vim, but if we want to open up Haskell to non hackers, maybe we need something more...

So can we continue like that and hope to have a few decent environments? Or shall we all agree on a direction and unite to provide the one true development environment for Haskell? Sometimes people say "Haskell is so different and advanced as a programming language, it needs a new type of editor/IDE". I don't disagree with it, but who has the vision of what the Haskell IDE should be?