Re: [ghc-steering-committee] Please review #220: QualifiedImports, Shepherd: Simon M

Hi Arnaud, Please rest assured I don't consider this to be an inconsequential stylistic change at all. Quite the opposite! Indeed, the fact that it has huge consequences is why I've been taking it so seriously. I don't want to rehash the debate, but let me just say that I think this has been a worthwhile conversation to have, and it might well be one that we revisit in the future. Cheers Simon On Tue, 17 Sep 2019 at 07:53, Spiwack, Arnaud wrote:

Dear all,

As one of the author of this proposal. I am, unsurprisingly, against rejecting it. Though it seems I'm rather in a minority here, let me add one last argument to try and sway the general opinion. Being understood that being an author, this argument cannot, in any way be considered as “a vote” or any such thing.

Human psychology is powerful. As it happens, we have a very strong tendency to choose whatever course of thought or action requires the least mental effort. Defaults require very little mental efforts, so we naturally will gravitate towards default. This is why, for instance, almost every Swedish worker is part of a union, while almost every French worker isn't: in Sweden, unionising is opt-out, whereas in France, it's opt-in. That's also why putting apples in front of sweet deserts in a school restaurant will result in more children eating fruits rather than cakes.

Back to our case: the overwhelming majority of Haskell packages are designed to be used unqualified (and also do almost all of their imports unqualified). Now, either unqualified import are really that much better, or the default has an enormous influence. As I previously mentioned, in Ocaml, a fairly similar language, qualified is the default, and almost every libraries are designed for qualified imports, and import their modules qualified. So I'd wager it's the default.

As a software architect, I do actually spend a bunch of my code reviews saying: you should import qualified. It would be a much more effective and powerful message to simply set the default imports as being qualified in my projects. For me, the change in this proposal would really be a very significant change.

Now, the committee may decide that this is still not worth the confusion implied by having two incompatible syntactic conventions out there. That's entirely fair! I just don't want anybody to walk out of this conversation with the feeling that this proposal is an inconsequential stylistic change.

/Arnaud

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 2:04 PM Sandy Maguire wrote:

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I'm happy with your reasoning, Simon, and am also in favor of rejection.

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 9:23 AM Simon Marlow wrote:

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Dear steering committee -

The discussion following my earlier suggestion to reject the proposal has petered out. Taking into account the discussion, it still seems to me that we should reject the proposal, so I've posted on the thread to this effect: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/220#issuecomment-5316665...

Any further comments before we close it?

Thanks Simon

On Fri, 5 Jul 2019 at 08:19, Simon Marlow wrote:

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Dear steering committee -

I am inclined to reject this proposal, so as per the new committee process I posted the rationale on the github thread: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/220#issuecomment-5084146...

You may want to consider the proposal and offer opinions while we wait for the authors' rebuttal. It's a very simple proposal.

Cheers Simon

On Wed, 3 Jul 2019 at 08:55, Joachim Breitner wrote:

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Dear Committee,

this is your secretary speaking:

QualifiedImports has been proposed by Arnaud Spiwack and Guillaume Bouchard https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/220

https://github.com/tweag/ghc-proposals/blob/qualified-import/proposals/0000-...

I propose Simon M as the shepherd.

Please reach consensus as described in https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals#committee-process In particular, talk to the authors before, if you think this should be rejected, and kick off the discussion on Github, following the steps described under “Now the shepherd proposes to accept or reject the proposal” in the above link.

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

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