Since you're already keeping a text file, have you considered using nix (the package manager) to declare all your software packages?

If you don't want a package cluttering up your system, but also don't want to forget about its existence you can just comment it out.

No, I haven't. I know there's package managers that help you keep track of what's installed, and tools that help you easily see what you've done. I just find putting a line in a text file with what I did right after I did it is less convoluted and doesn't really add to what I have to do. Automating it sounds nice in theory but actually doing it is messy and convoluted in practice.

A usual line for an install is the package name, the package type (flatpak, appimage, tarball, AUR, deb, etc) and a description of what the package is. Not much longer than the command I typed in to install.

I also keep notes on changes to the system, services created, paths changed, firewall rules, detailed notes on big things and stuff like that. Any time I run into something weird I reference it and make sure it's not something I did before I go hunting for a solution.

Maybe script(1) would helpful to you? [0]

[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/script

From what I've heard most land-use in the world goes towards animal agriculture - mainly for growing feed. Don't quote me, but I think it's over 40% of all land use in the USA. On balance I'd be far more concerned about the destruction of habitat for already endangered wildlife.

What percentage of usable land is actually used, and what percentage of that usable land percentage is used destructively?

Try elm (http://elm-lang.org/) first; it doesn't mention Functor, Applicative, Monoid, Monad anywhere.

You might come back to Haskell later and it won't seem like such a big deal. (I use Haskell for serious work and love that a quick patch doesn't suddenly start breaking things in 10 other places - it's a real time-saver!)

There's a proposal at the moment to reduce comma-noise a bit, which I think might help the situation if it's accepted: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm-discuss/PMGBcspBDiM/m6a3...

It's nice to see elm-html-shorthand in the wild. Please let me know what needs improving.

(Task x) has monadic structure, yes (see andThen, succeed). Naturally it also looks like Functor, Applicative, etc.

However, there is no way to work with monads in the abstract in Elm (yet), there is only the concrete API.

If it has those primitives, why not just wrap them up into a bind operator?

I've defined (?) in http://package.elm-lang.org/packages/circuithub/elm-maybe-ex... in the mean time.

Our core services at https://circuithub.com is built on Haskell.

> We all like simple tools. Complexity kills. It makes our work difficult and gives us much steeper learning curve. Programmers need to know how things work. Otherwise, they feel insecure. If we work with a complex system, then we have a big gap between “I am using it” and “I know how it works”.

One answer to this problem of opaqueness in abstractions is having a well defined denotational semantics. This makes it clear that something can work in one way & only one way (without the need to dive into library internals). I feel that Elm is doing a pretty good job of tackling this for GUIs and signals.