While we are here, let me say
A BIG THANK YOU TO THE CORE LIBRARIES COMMITTEE
Library design has a lot of detail, and a lot of competing priorities. I am personally very grateful to the CLC for the work they put into this. Like many crucial tasks it's one that often seems to attract more complaints than thanks, but they are doing us all a huge service, and at significant cost in terms of their most precious and inelastic commodity: their personal time.
Remember, as Dan says, before the CLC we no process whatsoever for library evolution... various people made various patches, and there was no way of getting anything substantial done. So we are far far further on than before.
Still not perfect, as my last post said. But still: THANK YOU.
Simon
| -----Original Message-----
| From: Dan Doel [mailto:dan.doel@gmail.com]
| Sent: 21 October 2015 22:23
| To: Geoffrey Mainland
| Cc: Simon Peyton Jones; Augustsson, Lennart; Henrik Nilsson; haskell-
| prime@haskell.org List; Haskell Libraries
| Subject: Re: Breaking Changes and Long Term Support Haskell
|
| Hello,
|
| I'm Dan Doel. I'm on the core libraries committee (though I'm speaking
| only for myself). As I recall, one of the reasons I got tapped for it
| was due to my having some historical knowledge about Haskell; not
| because I was there, but because I've gone back and looked at some old
| reports and whatnot (and sometimes think they're better than what we
| have now).
|
| But, I was around (of course) when the core libraries committee
| started up, so perhaps I can play the role of historian for this as
| well.
|
| The reason the committee exists is because a couple years ago, people
| brought up the ideas that were finally realized in the
| Applicative-Monad proposal and the Foldable-Traversable proposal. A
| lot of people weighed in saying they thought they were a good idea,
| and significantly fewer people weighed in saying they thought that it
| shouldn't happen for various reasons---roughly the same things that
| people are still bringing up about these proposals.
|
| This wasn't the first time that happened, either. I think it was
| widely agreed among most users that Functor should be a superclass of
| Monad since I started learning Haskell around 10 years ago. And once
| Applicative was introduced, it was agreed that that should go in the
| middle of the two. But it appeared that it would never happen, despite
| a significant majority thinking it should, because no one wanted to do
| anything without pretty much unanimous consent.
|
| So, one question that got raised is: why should this majority of
| people even use Haskell/GHC anymore? Why shouldn't they start using
| some other language that will let them change 15-year-old mistakes, or
| adapt to ideas that weren't even available at that time (but are still
| fairly old and established, all things considered). And the answer was
| that there should be some body empowered to decide to move forward
| with these ideas, even if there is some dissent. And frankly, it
| wasn't going to be the prime committee, because it hadn't shown any
| activity in something like 3 years at the time, and even when it was
| active, it didn't make anywhere near the sort of changes that were
| being discussed.
|
| And the kicker to me is, many things that people are complaining about
| again (e.g. the FTP) were the very things that the committee was
| established to execute. I don't think we had a formal vote on that
| proposal, because we didn't need to. Our existence was in part to
| execute that proposal (and AMP). And then a year ago, when it was
| finally time to release the changes, there was another ruckus. And we
| still didn't have a CLC vote on the matter. What we did was conduct a
| community poll, and then SPJ reviewed the submissions. But I don't
| mean to pass the buck to him, because I'm pretty sure he was worried
| that we were crazy, and overstepping our bounds. Just, the results of
| the survey were sufficient for him to not overrule us.
|
| So my point is this: there seems to be some sentiment that the core
| libraries committee is unsound, and making bad decisions. But the
| complaints are mostly not even about actual decisions we made (aside
| from maybe Lennart Augustsson's, where he is unhappy with details of
| the FTP that you can blame on us, but were designed to break the least
| code, instead of being the most elegant; if we had pleased him more,
| we would have pleased others less). They are about the reasons for
| founding the committee in the first place. You can blame us, if you
| like, because I think it's certain that we would have approved them if
| we had formally voted. We just didn't even need to do so.
|
| Forgive me if I'm wrong, but suggestions that these decisions should
| have been deferred to a Haskell Prime committee mean, to me, that the
| hope is that they would have been rejected. That the Haskell Prime
| committee should have just vetoed these proposals that something like
| 80% or more of practicing Haskell users (as far as we can tell) wanted
| for years before they finally happened. That the Haskell Prime
| committee should be responsible for enforcing the very status quo that
| led to the CLC in the first place, where proposals with broad support
| but minority dissent never pass for various core modules.
|
| If this is the case, then one could simply repose the earlier
| question: why should most of these people stick around to obey by the
| Haskell Prime committee's pronouncements, instead of getting to work
| on a language that incorporates their input?
|
| And if it isn't, then I don't ultimately understand what the
| complaints are. We try to accomplish the (large) changes in a manner
| that allows transition via refactoring over multiple versions (and as
| I mentioned earlier, some complaints are that we compromised _too
| much_ for this). And in light of the more recent complaints, it's even
| been decided that our time frames should be longer. Rolling up changes
| into a report just seems like it makes transitions less smooth. Unless
| the idea is to make GHC capable of switching out entire base library
| sets; but someone has to implement that, and once you have it, it
| makes the report specifications _less_ essential.
|
| Anyhow, that's my history lesson. Take it as you (all) will.
|
| Cheers,
| -- Dan
|
| On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Geoffrey Mainland
|