Re: Breaking Changes and Long Term Support Haskell

On 10/22/2015 07:37 PM, Gregory Collins wrote:

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 11:40 PM, Edward Kmett wrote:

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All I'm saying is that if we want to appeal to or cater to working

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software engineers, we have to be a lot less cavalier about causing more work for them, and we need to prize stability of the core infrastructure more highly. That'd be a broader cultural change, and that goes beyond process: it's policy.

The way things are shaping up, we've had 17 years of rock solid stability

I have >95% confidence that all of the C++ programs I wrote 15 years ago would build and work if I dusted them off and typed "make" today. I have Haskell programs I wrote last year that I probably couldn't say that about.

I wouldn't be so confident, if I were you :). Did you use *any* external libraries in your project? You'll probably find that no distibution actually ships the versions you used. Did you have any implemenetation-defined behavior in your project? That behavior may well have changed with a more up-to-date compiler -- and good luck getting that old compiler running on any current platform. (&c.) It would be interesting as a data point if you could just try a few projects. Regards,