Im with Gabriel on this one. As satisfying as it might be to play "what if", I value the coherent community far too much.

That said, I'd be perfectly happy if many of these things happened organically within that larger community, and there has been steadily growing support for these reforms, so I remain hopeful that it can happen naturally.


On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 9:27 PM, Gabriel Gonzalez <gabriel439@gmail.com> wrote:

With all that has changed in the last 15 years, I think it's high time
to fork Haskell, tear off all the bandaids, and begin afresh. This won't
solve all the problems, of course. We will still despair of the numeric
hierarchy; we will still despair of the partial functions demanded by
the Haskell spec; we will still worry about how to resolve things like
MPTCs, type families, and all that. But at least we can finally put
these particular ghosts to rest. Alas, to fork the language is to split
the community. And while I advocate such drastic measures, they are
measures which cannot be resolved either on this list or by the
(intentionally conservative) haskell' committee.
   

I disagree.  Many of these changes have perfectly fine incremental solutions.  Moreover, none of these issues are actually impediments to building real-world Haskell code.  I'm not going to sabotage the future of the Haskell language just so that I can play golf with my import list.

Everybody here is making way too big of a deal over things that are very minor issues to working Haskell programmers.  The reason nobody has fixed these things is because they aren't really an impediment to Haskell programming.

This discussion has nothing to do with broadening our language's appeal to the larger programming community.  There are much more important issues that this community struggles with like deployment, mindshare, and tooling.  If we spent as much time recruiting new programmers as we did arguing over all this Foldable/Traversable stuff we wouldn't have these problems in the first place.

-1

_______________________________________________
Libraries mailing list
Libraries@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries