Dean Michael Berris

For a while now already I've been wanting to be able to hone my skills in Haskell programming -- not because it's a fad I'm interested in doing, but also to evaluate whether I can use the language in some of my projects. One thing I've always wanted to do is write a code generator that will set up the skeleton of a project and just allow me to customize the parts that are necessary. I find myself writing some things over and over again that I'd much rather save time by automating things. So I set out to setup a Haskell development environment in Alice -- my trusty and surprisingly capable netbook.

Installing GHC

So first thing I did was install the Glasgow Haskell Compiler for Windows. Yes kids, there's an installer for Windows. You may have to tweak a few things in your PATH environment variable to get all the tools required to work right -- and maybe create a directory "C:\Program Files\Haskell\bin" where you can put a copy of ghc.exe so that it gets found correctly by the command prompt.

You can get the Windows installer from the GHC download page.

Installing `cabal-install`

Next thing I did was install a pre-built binary of `cabal-install` which is available from the project download page. This is an executable that you can drop into your C:\Program Files\Haskell\bin directory so that you can perform the `cabal install` family of commands. Think of it as your Haskell source for cool open source libraries and applications.

Setting Up the Environment

So the last thing for me to do was to get a half-decent IDE in place. Since Alice is a netbook, I didn't bother installing EclipseFP (which has support for Haskell development), and I really didn't want to install emacs (which also has great Haskell support). There is also the Visual Studio plugin but since I don't have my own Visual Studio license, that really wasn't an option for me.

Then I figured, hey Notepad++ is a good -- actually, apparently very good -- text editor in Windows. I think this is a great piece of open source application development, and I tip my hat to the developers of that project. There aren't a lot of great open source applications out there for Windows, but the next time I set up a machine I'll definitely install this as one of the first few software products that I will install. So enough praise, I set it up and in a matter of minutes (depending on your internet download speed) I was up and running a Haskell development system.

Next Steps

Now I intend to learn more about what I can do with Haskell as far as code generation, file template handling, and data processing is concerned. I don't want to do parallel computing stuff on Alice just yet -- even though apparently I have the newer generation Atom processors that have hyperthreading. Will I ditch C++ for most of my high performance programming work? Not by a long shot. But if it proves to be a good proposition to do Haskell development for certain things that need higher level maintainability and not necessarily raw performance and scalability, then I just might consider developing applications in Haskell.

More about Haskell development when I have more stuff to post about it.