I agree that more opinionation would really improve the new user experience.
There’s currently no clear pathway to getting a web app running from the purescript.org landing page, even for users who read through both the quick start guide and the documentation page.
Something like create-react-app would be great. For now, it could just be a template clone command.
This would favor a particular toolchain and framework, but I don’t think that’s worse than the existing alternative of no direction. The unfairness could be partially remedied with a link to a “more frameworks” page.
Having official templates would also help focus everyone’s maintenance efforts and be a consistent springboard for tutorials.
For example, it would be nice if we could arrive at best practices from each of these 7 reasonable Halogen templates and track one of them under the purescript-contrib org.
purescript-halogen/purescript-halogen-template
citizennet/purescript-halogen-template
milesfrain/purescript-halogen-template/tree/tooling
cah6/purescript-halogen-template
charlescrain/create-react-app-halogen
tbenst/purescript-nix-example
JordanMartinez/learn-halogen/blob/latestRelease/src/05-ComponentTemplate-A.purs
Edit: Found some additional discourse discussion on create-react-app:
Also, here are details on how create-react-app manages templates.
We can also look to create-elm-app for inspiration, which is an excellent new user experience.
Maybe we could someday reach the state where we’re just telling new users to run one of the following:
spago init --template halogen
spago init --template react-basic-hooks
spago init --template cli
... etc.