A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
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A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
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Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
#2Haskell is extremely complex, and that’s the point: to isolate complexity at the language level, where safe patterns can be researched, developed, and then scaled out to arbitrary applications.
Please call this “Towards a simple Haskell web stack” or something else less oxymoronic.
Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
#3Haskell is extremely complex, and that’s the point: to isolate complexity at the language level, where safe patterns can be researched, developed, and then scaled out to arbitrary applications. Please call this “Towards a simple Haskell web stack” or something else less oxymoronic.
I am going to disagree with this simply because it's talking about the stack, not the language.
As a Haskell developer who uses a much more complex stack than provided in the article, and seen too many "there aren't enough basic Haskell web stack tutorials!" posts here and there, I would say the library choices here fit that bill perfectly.
That said, once the adventerous non-Haskell user builds a basic application using this stack, they will then run into the brick wall of using a language which you are calling "complex", I would argue "different", and realizing there are a lot of new things they need to learn to actually be productive in it.
Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
#4I think a simple web stack should aspire to the simplicity of the PHP stack, twenty years ago:
1) Create a directory "foo" on your server
2) Make a file called "bar.php" in that directory
3) Write "Hello World!" in the file
4) Open http://localhost/foo/bar.php in the browser and see "Hello World!"
Lines of code or configuration so far: zero.
5) Add some actual code to bar.php
6) Reload the page and see the result
Number of steps to rebuild or restart: zero.
Then you can add templating, routing, logging, testing, anything. I'm not married to the PHP language, it's a mess. But the idea of keeping simple things simple is very important, and from what I see of today's developers, that idea has been utterly forgotten. Memory-holed. It's astonishing, I can barely believe that it happened.
EDIT: Sorry, I just said this offhand and didn't mean to hijack the discussion. Feel free to downvote, so something more on-topic gets on top.
Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
#5This is exactly the stack I used when I started building a webapp in Haskell, it was nice. I never finished my webapp though (but that wasn't Haskell's fault).
Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
#6I think a simple web stack should aspire to the simplicity of the PHP stack, twenty years ago: 1) Create a directory "foo" on your server 2) Make a file called "bar.php" in that directory 3) Write "Hello World!" in the file 4) Open http://localhost/foo/bar.php in the browser and see "Hello World!" Lines of code or configuration so far: zero . 5) Add some actual code to bar.php 6) Reload the page and see the result Nu…
I remember fondly those early days with PHP before it dawned on me how many peculiarities it had. However to be fair these steps came only after you’d managed to set up the server which was non-trivial on its own.
These days I feel like python/flask does it simpler. True you need to define a function and use a decorator, but saves you having to set up the server before getting started on site itself.
Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
#7Haskell is extremely complex, and that’s the point: to isolate complexity at the language level, where safe patterns can be researched, developed, and then scaled out to arbitrary applications. Please call this “Towards a simple Haskell web stack” or something else less oxymoronic.
> Haskell is extremely complex
I extremely disagree. I think C++ is extremely complex. Haskell is simple by comparison [0].
Once you understand enough Haskell to write basic programs in it this stack is roughly similar in scope to a Ruby + Sinatra or Python + Flask web application.
Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
#8I think a simple web stack should aspire to the simplicity of the PHP stack, twenty years ago: 1) Create a directory "foo" on your server 2) Make a file called "bar.php" in that directory 3) Write "Hello World!" in the file 4) Open http://localhost/foo/bar.php in the browser and see "Hello World!" Lines of code or configuration so far: zero . 5) Add some actual code to bar.php 6) Reload the page and see the result Nu…
That sounds like what Zeit.co is doing. Now.sh is nearly zero-config for a static HTML index and any number of functions in many languages under /api/
In their version 1 they actually even looked for index.js in the root and evaluated that one, but now such a thing requires config (and it isn’t even clear on how to achieve it)
Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
#9Haskell is extremely complex, and that’s the point: to isolate complexity at the language level, where safe patterns can be researched, developed, and then scaled out to arbitrary applications. Please call this “Towards a simple Haskell web stack” or something else less oxymoronic.
> Haskell is extremely complex I extremely disagree. I think C++ is extremely complex. Haskell is simple by comparison [0]. Once you understand enough Haskell to write basic programs in it this stack is roughly similar in scope to a Ruby + Sinatra or Python + Flask web application. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNRju6_yn3o
It depends on what we mean by Haskell.
If we mean "Haskell the latest specification" that's Haskell 2010. I suppose we could think of it as pretty simple, though lazy evaluation means that any implementation of it is going to be complicated.
However I don't know of a single company that uses plain Haskell 2010. They all use GHC (or more complex tools like GHCJS!) and GHC Haskell is a beast: https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_gu...
Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell
#10I think a simple web stack should aspire to the simplicity of the PHP stack, twenty years ago: 1) Create a directory "foo" on your server 2) Make a file called "bar.php" in that directory 3) Write "Hello World!" in the file 4) Open http://localhost/foo/bar.php in the browser and see "Hello World!" Lines of code or configuration so far: zero . 5) Add some actual code to bar.php 6) Reload the page and see the result Nu…
This is a different kind of simple.
The simple the OP seems to be going for is the "Ruby + Sinatra," "Python + Flask," "PHP + Laravel" type of simple: a few libraries with small APIs that can make a serviceable starting base. The audience for this are experienced and are not making their first web application.