On 6 December 2010 21:57, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
Agreeed. Put more concretely, developers strongly prefer that ugly warts in the language be *fixed*, even at the expense of backward compatibility. Java, in particular, breaks things because a sufficient number of developers have asked that backward compatibility be discarded in favor of fixes.
I'm not surprised that developers want ugly warts fixed, my contention is that developers have overlooked that this change [*] has a different magnitude to themselves compared to educators / authors and beginners. [*] Personally I don't consider the status quo here to be an ugly wart. The redundancy of notations between Applicative and Monad has useful separation of Applicative and Monadic styles for *current* Haskell. If Post-Haskell or even Haskell'2012 wants to merge the styles to "bind only when you need to" that's fine but the new language is obliged to create the tutorials, text books, write the conference papers in the new style, etc.