On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Sjoerd Visscher
Packages like lens now jump through hoops to be able to do composition with the Prelude (.), making proper abstraction impossible, resulting in horrible error messages spewing the internals of the library to the unsuspecting user.
Category is inadequate for the type of composition that goes on in lens. lens relies on the type class system to induce subtyping between the various types it defines (aliases). If you create abstraction barriers around things like Iso, Lens, Prism, Traversal, etc. then each of these will only compose with like things, and one of the major features of lens would be lost. Category also doesn't work for the four-parameter versions of things required for full generality. So lens isn't a very compelling motivation for Category composition. -- Dan