First experience with Haskell and the kindness of strangers on IRC

I am working this summer on a project with Haskell, the quasi-fabulous functional language. I haven't actually got to working with the language itself yet as I stumbled getting the right version built. The project I am working on requires an unreleased version of Haskell and I must have goofed in building it.

Fortunately there is the #haskell IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. The folks there steered me in the right direction (my build was hosed and I am starting again from scratch). And I found out about ERC, an excellent Emacs IRC client that I wish I'd known about before!