Hi Simon,
On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Simon Peyton-Jones
But I understand you as saying "fine, let's try it and see".
Lets try and see.
There's a balance isn't there? Changing the API of a widely used library imposes costs on lots of other people, and it's reasonable to take their concerns into account.
If "legalization" was needed to prevent maintainers from breaking APIs and upsetting users, we'd expect to see lots of upset users as the absolute majority of packages is not maintained using any such legislative document. We must therefore conclude that there must be something else that prevents maintainers from breaking their APIs (unnecessarily). These other effects (i.e. social dynamics) are much more flexible than prescriptive documents that by their nature typically are more absolutist. Cheers, Johan