I think you're missing the point of the platform!
I suppose I did miss the point of the platform: I was trying to build it, which requires at least part of the platform. As I say, the reason I was trying to build it was that I wrongly blamed the ubuntu package for WASH not working. But that was not dumb unless you consider it obvious that 7 year old code would be broken, in which case it would be obvious that nobody would trust this language in production.
And unless somebody can explain to me how I would rescue my business now if I had opted for WASH By patching it. Surely we are talking about minor changes here.
Yeah but how many minor changes? This trigger-happiness is rife. And that's the first time anybody suggested the necessary changes to WASH should be minor. Everybody else thinks I was nuts to expect anything from 7 year old code. I don't know because I couldn't get past the install. Somebody had deleted getPackageId. Please would somebody explain to me what getPackageId did to incriminate itself? I'm sure there's something much groovier now, like getting it inside a monad in case it changes during the installation itself (pretty likely AFAICT) but it's really just a package id. Can we honestly philosophise about the mathematical rigour of getPackageId? It was needlessly assassinated. For all I know WASH might be just fine apart from that, and maybe I would have liked it, even if it is from the dark ages. Yes there are times when something has to change. I acknowledged that in my original post. But I see no evidence whatsoever that anybody in control of Haskell is holding fire even on things as innocent as getPackageId or as ubiquitous as the prelude. I'm not asking for the opposite extreme of conservatism, just a bit of common sense instead of this bloodbath.