Many people coming into Haskell are daunted by number of choices they have to make: which package to use, which package manager to use, which language extensions to turn on, which resources to read.

So here are some sensible default choices. I’ve noted wherever the answer is still up in the air. Most things are! Many problems in our world have good, but not great, solutions.

Setting up a Haskell environment on OS X

Use stack. Stack

  • Is a sandbox-style package manager. For each project it creates a hermetic little world filled with the project’s dependencies and the project itself.

  • Sets up a “global” project, which is the default project you work in when you run stack outside a project.

  • By the way, a project is any directory with a *.cabal or a package.yaml file or any subdirectory thereof. I highly recommend using package.yaml files, otherwise known as the hpack format. With *.cabal files you have to type the name of each module separately and you have to maintain per-target dependencies. What a hassle.

  • Also installs GHC (stack setup) for you.

  • Also maintains your PATH. If you run stack exec foo or stack ghci, you’re running foo and ghci in the context of your project’s sandbox.

Awooga: OS X users will be tempted to use Homebrew to install Stack but that will compile it from source, which takes a good hour on a desktop and possibly longer on laptops. (I have never been patient enough to find out.) Best to just unzip an official release.

The community

Is the best part of Haskell. The community is incredibly kind and supportive. /r/haskell is a medium-traffic subreddit filled with library announcements, fascinating discussions, questions answered by experts, and much else besides. Try Stack Overflow too.

Learning Haskell

Creating a new package

$ cd ~/workspace
$ stack new hello

See also:

$ stack templates

The pain of compilation

Compiling Haskell is slow. Add this to your global aliases (assuming you use zsh):

alias .fast='--fast --ghc-options="-j +RTS -A1024m -n2m -RTS"'

It will teach GHC to use (1) all your cores and (2) more memory while compiling.

Another useful global alias (assuming you use zsh):

alias .fw='--file-watch'

Usage:

  • stack build .fast .fw
  • stack ghci .fast
  • stack install lens .fast

Another suggestion: rebind ; to : in your terminal preferences. When Haskelling I never type semicolon but I sure do type colon all the time.

Editor environment

You can’t go wrong with my Haskell Emacs scratchpad. Emacs and Vim are both pretty good choices. Really you need these things:

  • Syntax highlighting

  • Live parsing and typechecking

  • hlint’s suggestions

  • Autocompletion of horribly long module names

  • Being able to send code to an interactive GHC REPL

  • Restarting the REPL when your .cabal file changes

  • Being able to go from

      f x = x

    to

      f :: a -> a
  f x = x

    with one keypress.

With the right packages, Emacs and Vim have all these features.

IDEs: hdevtools or Intero

This is an active field of development!

  • hdevtools runs a GHCi process in the background and lets your editor interactively query it for typechecking and code-reloading purposes. Comes with integrations for Emacs, Vim, Atom, and Sublime. This is the one that I use.

  • Intero is an Emacs-specific IDE and a rising star. I have not used this much but people speak highly of it.

HTTP client

Use wreq.

HTTP server

Use warp. It implements WAI. If you’re coming from Python, WAI is Haskell’s WSGI. Or Ruby’s Rack. Or Perl’s PSGI.

WAI even supports HTTP/2 now.

HTTP framework

This is an active field of development!

This is more divisive. I like to think of each web framework by what new technologies and abstractions they use. These three have all picked very interesting choices, making the Haskell web framework field very diverse:

  • Snap: Snap uses lenses in a neat way that lets you attach additional information to the request at each middleware layer. I think I’m drastically oversimplying snaplets.

  • Yesod: Yesod has great documentation. It also uses conduits, which is a neat little library for modeling streams (with – and this is the hard part – reasonable memory management and error handling) in Haskell. It uses Template Haskell to remove some of the boilerplate of web programming.

  • Servant: Servant is newer but has a cool higher-kinded routes system where you can declare the type of your entire API with type-level programming.

This isn’t like Python or Ruby’s web framework ecosystem, where everybody has sort of decided to coalesce around a monolithic, invent-the-wheels framework (Django, Rails) with lots of smaller, more modular options (Camping, Sinatra, Flask). Lens, conduits, and type-level programming are all cutting-edge stuff.

Web Sockets

Use jaspervdj/websockets for insecure port-80 Web Sockets; use Taylor Fausak’s wuss to get TLS.

JSON

Use Aeson.

Unicode text

Use Data.Text. It’s built on bytestrings and is fast and supports the bare minimum Unicode slicing and dicing. For more Unicode support, see text-icu.

Binary data

Use Data.ByteString. If you need to represent text, upgrade yourself immediately to text.

Lazy text or bytestrings?

I would say avoid them unless you really know what you’re doing. I say this as somebody who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Lazy IO?

Lazy IO causes more heartache with resource management and error handling than you would expect. Try pipes or conduit instead, which lets you build out streaming data pipelines without leaking file handles or badly handling IO errors. Unfortunately they’re both a little hard to use.

OpenGL

This is an active field of development!

The most comprehensive and well-organized OpenGL library for Haskell is gl by Edward Kmett. How it works is elegant: it downloads the OpenGL specification into a gl.xml file and then it produces a Haskell library from that XML file. Code that writes code. Its documentation is poor, however; for a tutorial see the primer on Wright Access. For toy examples, see ekmett/quine. Unfortunately the graphics story for Haskell is not quite all there yet.

Lenses

You’re going to keep hearing about lenses because the lens package has achieved remarkable success in the past couple of years, both in terms of creativity and popularity. This series of blog posts takes the time to explain and derive lenses. Lenses tutorials have the same problem as monad tutorials. The reason lenses and monads exist is long-time Haskellers all noticed the same problem, and a lot of (abstract) thought went into thinking of a solution. The original sin of lenses is functionally updating a complicated data structure. The solution is … complicated.

Some lens tips and tricks:

  • Prisms, getters, setters, traversals, and uppercase-L Lens in the lens package all compose with . It all typechecks and type-inferences. This seems simple but it isn’t. It is one of those inventions, like Isaac Newton’s catflap, that does the magic of rendering the blindingly simple into existence. And that’s the secret genius of the lens package: against all odds, they got all the optics to compose with with .. (Aside: It is impossible in most other languages as it takes advantage of two unique Haskell features, rank-_n_ polymorphism and typeclasses.)

  • If you compose a bunch of lens together, you get back the lowest common denominator on this UML diagram. So composing a setter with anything automatically makes it the result a setter. And you can’t compose a setter with a getter – you need a Lens. And a Lens composed with a traversal is always a traversal. And only compositions of isomorphisms will yield an isomoprhism. Against all odds, they got all this UML diagram to work exactly as you think it would.

  • 99% of lens usage boils down to bigDataStructure operator (lens1 . lens2 . lens3), where operator is one of ^., ^?, or ^...

  • Stop packing and unpacking your strings into bytestrings and vice versa. Use Data.Text.Lens and Data.ByteString.Lens.

  • Stop calling toStrict/fromStrict and toChunks/fromChunks to convert between strict and lazy bytestrings (and texts). Use Control.Lens.Iso instead.

Prelude

The default prelude is super annoying because you keep importing tiny minimodules like Data.Monoid and Data.Maybe to get their helpers. The base-prelude package does all this for you, but you have to turn off implicit preludes (-XNoImplicitPrelude).

Pointfree

blunt is a little web app that gives you the pointfree version of any function. Be prepared to encounter headache-inducing oddities like (.) . (.) or the Applicative instance for (->) r.

Searching by types

If Hoogle can’t find it, try Hayoo.

Short functions

A good thing to watch out for is functions in Haskell that last for longer than five lines. These might take the form of long do blocks, or a mess of let ... in ... s and wheres. These often signal that the function is doing too much. Whereas in other languages we might resign ourselves to the mess, in Haskell we can do better.

I find writing a clean function f involves asking myself:

  • Is f is the composition of some series of functions? f = foo . bar . baz is one kind of function composition. But so is f = foo >>= bar >>= baz (and its categorical cousin f = foo >=> bar >=> baz).

  • Is f a map over some structure? If I’m taking a list and producing a list, I usually reach for map and filter.

  • If f folding a big structure into a smaller structure, which aggregates or summarizes the information in the big structure? If I’m taking a list and producing a single value, I usually reach for foldr and filter.

Horizon

Upcoming GHC developments we should be excited about:

Great Haskell blogs

Parametricity a.k.a. theorems for free

Using types and typeclasses to generate and prove theorems about a function’s invariants. This is like if all your life you carried around this intuition about how something works and then one day someone came along and validated all of it with mathematics and good writing.

Opting into strictness

Confused about seq and weak-head normal form? Read Roman Cheplyaka’s blog post on forcing lists.

Fiber

The older you get, the more you’ll appreciate a moderate amount of fiber in your daily diet.

Monospace font

Try Ubuntu Mono!

Updates to this document

  • 2015 Nov 30: the initial draft was published after a rousing discussion in my friends and I’s #haskell Slack channel.

  • 2016 Jan 3: added Web Sockets mention after a fun day with Slack’s real-time messaging API.

  • 2016 Aug 18: hdevtools and intero mentioned. Typos fixed.