On January 28, 2015 at 5:57:56 AM, Simon Peyton Jones (simonpj@microsoft.com) wrote:
Just to be clear, this isn't my proposal: it's from Lennart and Neil. They did come to see me; I had indeed entirely missed the fact that the Prelude was changing so much; I did encourage them to explicitly and clearly air their concerns. But I don't feel ready to take a personal position on how best to move forward.
Thanks for the clarity Simon. Apologies for contributing to noise by a sloppy reading of earlier messages in this thread. I’ve been advocating that it is important that a FAQ be written up on the BBP to make the maze of (careful) choices more understandable to a lay audience. That will at least help the discussion to not repeatedly cover the same ground. If nobody else manages to step in and do it, I’ll see what I can get done myself in the next few days. Cheers, Gershom
I very much value what the Core Libraries Committee does. Good libraries are a foundational component of a language and, although it's not very glamourous, working on making the libraries (particularly the core ones) work smoothly is incredibly valuable. So we all owe huge thank you to the Core Libraries Committee.
It's unfortunate that all this has arisen so late in the 7.10 release cycle. Perhaps I should have been paying more attention. Perhaps the CLC should have published the proposal, and with clearer signposting. Perhaps Lennart and Neil should have been more vocal earlier. But it's unproductive to discuss who to blame, and we probably all carry some responsibility. (We might want to learn some lessons for the future, though; one being that changes to the Prelude need particular care and advertising.)
More important is what to do next. Let's talk about how to resolve this during this week. A small group of us (including Edward K and Lennart) plan to have a Skype call on Monday. But the more we have a clear set of alternatives, the better.
Simon