Hi,
GHC2021 turned out quite well, let's stick to it for a while and see how Haskell evolves in the next five to ten years.
that’s an interesting take. For me it was always clear that GHC20xx is meant to be a continuous process (with yet to determined cadence), but you are proposing that GHC2021 (not …xx!) could be, for now, the final product? That’s certainly a valid position as well, but not one that achieves the goals we (or at least I) had when coming up with the GHC20xx. Am Montag, dem 23.01.2023 um 02:20 +0300 schrieb Vladislav Zavialov:
* We shouldn't change our mind about the recommended extensions so often
I don’t think it’s changing our mind. It’s a natural process of stabilization and maturization that two years later some more extensions have been proven to be good enough to no longer be extensions, but simply be Haskell. Also, we make mistakes. Over on the PR Oleg makes an excellent argument why a language with Data.Safe.coerce and GeneralisedNewtypeDeriving really also needs role annotations. I’d like to be able to fix my mistakes.
* We shouldn't overwhelm the user with unnecessary choice (which edition is best?)
Right now it's down to Haskell98, Haskell2010, and GHC2021, which is good. Each added option makes things worse.
I disagree. Once we have, say, GHC2021, GHC2023 and GHC2024 out there. Then these are not equally valid options, no more than programmers currently decide whether to use text-0, text-1, or text-2. Like there, our GHC20xx numbers are _versions_, and at least for new projects hopefully nobody should ever have to pick an older version than the newest supported by their GHC. It is a good point, however, that we need to communicate that, and present it in the users’s guide accordingly. For example, document the latest prominently, and the others in a separate section “previous language editions”. And maybe also document “on-by-default features (default since GHC20xx, can be disabled with -XNo…)” and actual “extensions” separately. (I agree that more options are bad, thus my motivation for GHC20xx is to _reduce_ options that programmers have to make: by reducing the number of language extensions they have to decide about!) Cheers, Joachim -- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/