On Wed, 15 May 2013, Edward Kmett wrote:
Personally, I'd be all for just moving Foldable (and Traversable) into the Prelude and retiring the monomorphic versions of the functions they supply. Both abstractions have born the test of time, and its hard to even envision Haskell without them at this point. I'm somewhat leery that we coud get this proposal past the "but it makes it harder to introduce people to Haskell" backlash, but I'd wholeheartedly support it.
-1 1. Prelude should be backwards compatible and since it is implicitly imported everywhere, barriers for changing something should be especially high. 2. I see a shift away from Prelude functions to more generalized functions (Foldable.mapM_, Traversable.mapM, Category.(.), RMonad, alternative numeric classes etc.) This way people have to import identifiers explicitly, which is a good idea anyway.