This proposal is always loudly shouted down by teachers and textbook authors who want to keep things simple and consistent. While I'm sympathetic, I think they've been going about it the wrong way.

I don't care deeply about fmap=map, but I am opposed to preserving the prelude in amber for teaching purposes.

Instead, I believe the teachers need to create their own requirements for a beginner's mode, and that we add long-term support for that with a few widely-published features.

For example:

{-# LANGUAGE BeginnerMode #-}
import BeginnerPrelude

plus a web page at haskell.org that every author could point to that would detail any changes.

Any book could remain relevant simply by updating a page linked to this site with relevant updates. These might include changes to the BeginnerPrelude as well as current help on transitioning from Beginner to the current full prelude.

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 2:51 AM, Nikita Volkov <nikita.y.volkov@gmail.com> wrote:

Since there's been so many suggestions concerning radically changing the Prelude recently, I'd like to start a poll on a subject.

I know that "map" is limited to lists for the beginners, but then we're already making a lot of unbeginnerish changes to Prelude. Also it's not a monad transformer, but just a functor - how can a person learn Haskell without understanding what a Functor is?

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