Picking the point where I gave up, giving me a list of 7 vscode plugins, without any guidance as to which are more mature, doesnt feel like a thing anyone would wish to know before they start.
No one said it's what they would wish to know before they start.
Take it from someone who spent 10 years on and off learning Haskell:
It's a guide to navigating the boobytrapped minefield of the Haskell ecosystem, from the difficulties of installing it for the first time, to the confusing type theory.
Those aren't 7 plugins to choose from. Those are 7 plugins you should use all 7 of because there is no unified coherent Haskell IDE or plugin, but there are a dozen other broken ones that look good in the catalog.
Much the same with libraries. You need a guide to tell you which ones are usable and which are abandoned experiments, since both live side by side in the main repos.
It is under active development and is the closest you can get to a "unified coherent Haskell plugin" - it comes with all the features you would get from installing the 7 plugins individually.
I have to agree. A more opinionated guide would be more useful than one full of so many long lists of alternatives; a learner is in no position to make those choices.
Is there maybe an article somebody can actually stand a chance of reading end to end? I think GP is right, there’s not a chance somebody who’s actually new to Haskell would find this useful as a true “things I wish I knew” article. It’s more of a complete reference to the entire language.
To me at least, “things I wish I knew” implies it’s some sort of companion to a real language guide/tutorial/book, not a replacement for one.
I'm sure you are right. That is just picking at one thing I will admit, but I do use vscode, so when I saw a section about how to best use haskell in vscode i was interested. I'm not interested enough, or as a beginner qualified, to evaluate 7 options.
The IDE problem is still a major pain in Haskell. However, for now there are just I think 2 main options to choose from, and it's fairly straightforward. Still, not everything works as expected yet.
We've come a really long way in just the past 3 years with IDE stuff. I suggest you give it another try if you're still interested in diving into Haskell.
What's the point of using 7 VSCode plugins for a language you don't even know? Just pick up any terminal, any text editor, and the freshest stable copy of GHC.
The VS Code plugin listed (haskell-ide-engine, https://github.com/haskell/haskell-ide-engine - to be more precise, it's a language server supporting many editors) is probably the one which sees the most development at the moment and comes with many of the other plugins listed or equivalent functionality (syntax highlighting, tab completion, linting via hlint, code formatting, refactoring) included. It certainly is the tool I would recommend to VS Code users.
This should be the #1 recommendation to anyone looking to get started IMO, it cleanly sets everything up for you and extracts it into an isolated development container.
Picking the point where I gave up, giving me a list of 7 vscode plugins, without any guidance as to which are more mature, doesnt feel like a thing anyone would wish to know before they start.