Announcement: Beta of Leksah IDE available

[Jürgen Nicklisch-Franken]

I'm proud to announce release 0.4.4 of Leksah, the Haskell IDE written
in Haskell. 
Leksahs current features include:
    * On the fly error reporting with location of compilation errors
    * Completion 
    * Import helper for constructing the import statements
    * Module browser with navigation to definition
    * Search for identifiers with information about types and comments
    * Project management support based on Cabal with a visual editor
    * Haskell customised editor with "source candy"
    * Configuration with session support, keymaps and flexible panes
For further information: leksah.org 

Please don't compare what we have reached to IDE's like VisualStudio,
Eclipse or NetBeans. I started Leksah June 1997 and work on it in my
spare time for fun. I started the project for various reasons. One was
to contribute to make Haskell successful in industry, because I suffer
from the use of inappropriate programming languages like C, C++, C# or
Java in my daily job. Another was to contribute to open source, which
I'm using privately almost exclusively. The first alpha version of
Leksah was published February 2008. Since the beginning of this year
Hamish Mackenzie joined the project and merged his Funa project with
Leksah, which gave a real boost.

I thank the people who have encouraged and helped me with their
comments, enthusiasm and support. I learned as well that the IDE issue
is a controversial theme in the community. I learned that "IDEs are big
evil nasty things", that "if you need an IDE, something is wrong with
your language", that it is scientifically proved, that "real cool
hackers will always use Emacs or vi". Most stupid I found the recurring
comment: "Every few years there is someone who starts a Haskell IDE
project and then gives up after a few years.". That will be true for
Leksah as well, if it will not be accepted and supported by the
community. The current state of Leksah is a proof of concept, that an
IDE for Haskell is not a difficult thing to do if the community supports
it and that it will in my view be of great help and will contribute
tremendously to spread Haskell.

So I please the members of the community to pause for a moment and try
out Leksah with a benevolent attitude.

Jürgen Nicklisch-Franken