On 5/20/13 6:59 PM, Felipe Almeida Lessa wrote:
IMHO, the problem is that the community isn't large enough to be able to suffer a split.
That is indeed the problem. Which is why we've argued about it forever without making any progress, IMO.
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.
That's actually what I had in mind, rather than a true (parallel) fork. Just an official jump from Haskell-1 to Haskell-2, with no claims of compatibility between the two. Of course, if we are going to do this, I think it'd be good to make the decision official and then take a year or so to work out the full details. That is, if we're going to break everything, we should make sure we don't overlook any of the low-hanging fruit[1]. Given the recent turnover for the haskell' committee, it'd be good to talk to them too. Even with a big jump, I think it'd be good to aim for conservatism; that is, the goal is to remove all the major warts, not to solve any deep problems. [1] One that has been bothering me recently is the requirement that methods of Enum are partial functions. I have a proposal for fixing this and generalizing enumeration, which I'll post as a package later this week. -- Live well, ~wren