On 06/04/2015 06:17 AM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
On 06/04/2015 04:24 AM, Phil Ruffwind wrote:
One can look at it this way -- the breakage is a fixed, one-time cost, whereas the confusion has a running cost.
It's not necessarily that simple. Breaking old code can also breaks all the tutorials, articles, and documentation scattered all over the Internet. That cost could last a long time. AFAIK Haskell hasn't done anything so drastic as to change the existing syntax, except to _remove_ things that were already strongly discouraged like n+k. It will also introduce confusion of a different kind, as programmers will find it strange that their formerly correct code code having suddenly changed semantics.
Of course we should take such concerns seriously, but given the rarity of such usage it would seem to indicate that not many people are using the "problematic" syntax in practice... which could be an indication that a) haven't learned/copy&pasted it from a tutorial/book, and/or b) haven't found it useful even if they *did* learn/copy&paste from a tutorial/book.
So there's that...
Dangit, just ignore this bit. I misread what the 0.3% thing applied to in Anthony Cowley's email.