Re: [ghc-steering-committee] Proposal #270: Support pun-free code. Recommendation: accept

I don’t think we should be in the business of overturning by fiat significant conventions that have been long established. I am really quite concerned about people pointing to proposals accepted by a technical committee and expanding this into wide-ranging normative conventions to be imposed on the general Haskell community after the fact. Accordingly I am flipping my recommendation. I now agree with Simon. Until we are satisfied that the wider consensus has been established — that these puns are no longer good style — I think we should *not* accept this proposal. The risks are too great and, as Simon points out, the potential benefits are not compelling. Chris

On 2022-08-24, at 11:49, Joachim Breitner wrote:

Hi,

thanks for the summary.

Am Mittwoch, dem 24.08.2022 um 07:27 +0100 schrieb Chris Dornan:

...

To (avoiding) this end, I suggest that we include wording in the user guide section documenting this extension to the effect that there is no consensus on the desirability or otherwise of the punful code the extension seeks to address.

I wonder if it isn’t really on us to address that and try to establish a consensus about where we want Haskell to evolve to? Should we not try to provide unifying guidance by choosing between

puns are fine and good practice, the language evolution takes that into account

and

puns are discouraged and undesirable, as they do not work smoothly with the Haskell we envision for the future, we provide work-arounds (like this proposal) when dealing with code that still has them

It seems that by accepting https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/378 we went down the second road, although the wording in that proposal, in section https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0378-de... is much more diplomatic than I was above.

Maybe the sentiment could be that puns are a bit like lazy IO: It used to be the thing to do so, it will continue to work, but they should no longer be considered current good practice.

Cheers, Joachim

-- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/

_______________________________________________ ghc-steering-committee mailing list ghc-steering-committee@haskell.org https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-steering-committee