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> why would you restrict yourself to Haskell? It's not bleeding edge any more.

I'm not using Haskell because it's bleeding edge.

I use it because it is advanced enough and practical enough. It's at a good balanced spot now to do practical things while tapping into some of the advances in programming language theory.

The compiler and the build system have gotten a lot more stable over the past several years. The libraries for most production-type activities have gotten a lot more mature.

And I get all of the above plus strong type safety and composability, which helps me maintain applications in a way that I find satisfactory. For someone who aims to be pragmatic with a hint of scholarliness, Haskell is great.

> The compiler and the build system have gotten a lot more stable over the past several years.

GHC2021 promises backwards compatibility, but it includes ill-specified extensions like ScopedTypeVariables. TypeAbstractions were just added, and they do the same thing, but differently.[0] It hasn't even been decided yet which extensions are stable[1], yet GHC2021 still promises compatibility in future compiler versions. So either, you'll have GHC retain inferior semantics because of backwards compatibility, or multiple ways of doing the same thing.

GHC2024 goes even further and includes extensions that are even more unstable, like DataKinds.

Another sign of instability is the fact that GHC 9.4 is still the recommended[2] release even though there are three newer 'stable' GHCs. I don't know of other languages where the recommendation is so far behind! GHC 9.4.1 is from Aug 2022.

It was the same situation with Cabal, it took forever to move beyond Cabal 3.6 because the subsequent releases had bugs.[3]

[0]: https://serokell.io/blog/ghc-dependent-types-in-haskell-3 [1]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/669 [2]: https://github.com/haskell/ghcup-metadata/issues/220 [3]: https://github.com/haskell/ghcup-metadata/issues/40

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