Jeremy Shaw and I had a bunch of conversations about this kind of thing, almost always ending with Jeremy citing this story. I found it at: http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2002/11/whats_wrong_with_rdf.html <famous-anecdote>Stuart Feldman, the Bell Labs guy who invented "make", woke
up one morning a few weeks after he'd released it, and realized that the syntax basically sucked - all those tabs and colons and weird continuation rules. He started working on something better and was shot down because someone said "Stuart, there are *dozens* of people using this, it's too late to change it."</famous-anecdote>
Please publish your alternative implementation in a blog or in a package on
Haskell. Think of all the children that will be spared in the future.
Cliff
On Nov 29, 2007 10:29 AM, Conor McBride
Hi folks
I realise I should have been paying more attention last March, and as such have no reason to expect any sympathy, let alone action.
I would, however, like to comment on the fact that the Data.Monoid instance for (Maybe x) prioritises monoidal structure from x over monoidal structure from Maybe. This makes it hard to use generic monoidal operations to support choice in the Maybe monad.
I don't know if this breaks anybody else's code, but it certainly breaks mine. I guess I'll just have to stop using Data.Monoid and roll my own. That's not a serious hardship, I suppose.
I have only myself to blame, and I'm not proposing that the Maybe behaviour is changed. I suppose people are busy enjoying the instance as it now stands, and that it would be damaging to change.
What a pity
Conor
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~ctm http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Ectm
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