On Fri, 18 Sep 2020, Isaac Elliott wrote:
I don't think that it's unreasonable in general to expect people to explore a codebase via IDE tooling. But given Haskell's current situation on that front, I currently agree with your approach to Haskell imports/exports.
I already lost many hours exploring orphaned codebases. Imagine a five year old package or say ten years that you cannot compile anymore. You do not know with what version of GHC it worked, and even if you would know, you will not be able to get this GHC version running anymore. You do not know which library versions the package used, because Build-Depends is missing version ranges. Even if you would know, you would not be able to get old library versions compiled with new GHC versions anymore. This orphaned package uses identifiers like "prim" and you have to search whether this is a local identifier or whether it is external and then from which package? No IDE will help with code that misses so many information.