On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 10:19:42AM -0400, Ryan Newton wrote:
What was the sample size on the 85% vote?
I don't know, but who is it sampling? [begin over-exaggerated strawmen - don't take the below personally!] Are we getting votes mostly from people who have been programming Haskell in their sleep for a decade, and who therefore are very involved with the language (so are subscribed to libraries@), but have forgotten how steep the slope to learning it is and are unaware that the generalisations they want may be raising the barrier to entry to an infeasibly high level? Or have all the long-timers gotten bored of the libraries list, and the votes are coming from an influx of new users who only started learning Haskell last month, who just joined the list, don't really know what mapM does but thinks a generalisation sounds cool so are voting for it? Or have I been campaigning my friends to vote for the option I think best? Or signing up for Yahoo accounts to cut out the middle man? [end strawmen] As a maintainer, a plain +1 or -1 from someone I don't know really doesn't tell me much. If the majority agree with my opinion, then it's fairly easy to take it as support, but if they disagree with my opinion then I don't know why (Have they misunderstood the implications? Has the selection bias meant that they weighted the different factors differently to the majority? Are they voting for what would be best for them, or what they think would be best for the whole community? Or could it be that I'm actually wrong!?). By contrast, Ivan's mail here: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2013-May/019988.html gives me a lot more insight. Unfortunately I'm struggling to think of changes to the proces that are strict improvments. The problem is that we have a mixture of simple proposals, where someone proposes we do something and most people agree that we should or shouldn't, and complex proposals, where different people think we should do different things and there are various arguments and counter arguments to consider. This wouldn't be so bad, except that it's not always clear at the outset whether a given proposal will turn out to be simple or complex (if we knew in advance, we could require justification for "votes" on complex proposals, but not for simple "should we add this obvious missing combinator" proposals).
Is there a website for keeping track of these persistently?
If a ticket is filed then it should summarise the opinions, but not all proposals have tickets filed. Thanks Ian -- Ian Lynagh, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/