2012/12/1 Tijn van der Zant
I think that there is more to take into account. Haskell is growing as a language that people use to solve scientific and business problems. It is starting to become more of a working language, which is a very good thing of course. But this also means that Haskell should accommodate the people who are only working with it (not developing the language) and might not have a clue about the developers of the language. I'm somewhere in between where I love to read about the developments (this is my first post) and use it to program robots in my lab (besides some other languages). To accommodate the people who just want to use Haskell, we might have a super-pragma (as previously proposed) and for those gaining skill it should be possible to subtract pragmas until you have turned them all off and you can call yourself a Haskell guru. Mind you, I am not one of those, simply because I have to program in 5 languages for my work. For me, all those pragmas are not a matter of ugliness, but more an annoyance. For starters it is even worse. They ask questions such as: What do I turn on? Did I already find a good pragma tutorial? Why do I need to know about pragmas if it is already difficult to learn the language? By subtracting the pragmas (or turning them off) people can learn what they actually do and improve their code and their thinking about the language. Quite often I need the get something done, and due to time pressure I do not always have the luxury to make the code beautiful. And since it is Haskell (if it compiles it probably does what you want) I do not always care. For many users, pragmas are a Haskell concept that they can live without in the first part of their Haskell programming career (and they just turn a load of them on without even thinking about it what they do, but hey, the code works now!...) I think that we should accommodate the 'working programmers' and make their life a little bit easier, so that it becomes easier to start programming in Haskell and the language can be put to use by more people. This does not exclude having a 'pragma prime' that includes proposals for Haskell' of course. But it would help people starting with Haskell a lot imho.
Thank you for highlighting the many ways in which pragmas are a problem from a practical point of view. -- Jason Dusek pgp // solidsnack // C1EBC57DC55144F35460C8DF1FD4C6C1FED18A2B