IMHO, the problem is that the community isn't large enough to be able
to suffer a split. Case in point: how are we going to have two GHC
HQs?
If we're going to burn bridges, perhaps we should follow a
Python-3-esque path of releasing a major upgrade together with:
- A refactoring tool to aid with the transition.
- A deadline of, say, 2-3 years during which the latest GHC for
current Haskell would receive bugfixes while GHC 8 moves along as
usual.
Cheers,
On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 7:49 PM, wren ng thornton
On 5/19/13 7:25 PM, Anthony Cowley wrote:
I think this issue may be too big to rely on mailing list +1s. Is there any precedent for having a web-based poll of some sort? We often get more engagement in debates on IRC and /r/haskell than the mailing list, so let's not let the choice of forum drive the result.
Indeed.
Personally, I'm all for blessing Foldable/Traversable as "built-in" and getting rid of the monomorphic legacy. But then, I'm also all for making Applicative a superclass of Monad, not having all the mtl modules re-export everything from Control.Monad, etc. However, all of these issues have a long history of discord, and that discord cannot be resolved on this list IMO.
I'm generally a staunch advocate of backward compatibility. However, these issues are ones where we've known the right answer for a long time (unlike refactoring the numeric type class hierarchy), and we've simply been unwilling to burn bridges in order to do the right thing. I love Haskell, and I respect the haskell' committee, but I think it's time to just burn it all down.
Let us not forget the original reasons for many of these warts. Some of them stem from ignorance or oversight (superclasses of Monad); others stem from the desire to help newcomers (monomorphism); and others stem from circularities in the language definition (the existence of the Prelude). As Haskell has developed, we have learned more ---therefore we should not embrace prior ignorance---, our standard idioms have evolved ---therefore clinging to list-monomorphism *causes* confusion rather than alleviating it---, and we've tried to remove much of the circularity involved in desugaring the various built-in notations for lists, arithmetic sequences, do-notation, etc.
With all that has changed in the last 15 years, I think it's high time to fork Haskell, tear off all the bandaids, and begin afresh. This won't solve all the problems, of course. We will still despair of the numeric hierarchy; we will still despair of the partial functions demanded by the Haskell spec; we will still worry about how to resolve things like MPTCs, type families, and all that. But at least we can finally put these particular ghosts to rest. Alas, to fork the language is to split the community. And while I advocate such drastic measures, they are measures which cannot be resolved either on this list or by the (intentionally conservative) haskell' committee.
-- Live well, ~wren
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-- Felipe.