foldable flexible bridges (putting foldable+traversable in prelude) Re: Burning bridges

[Mark Lentczner]

Ay yi yi!

A few thoughts on all of this:

1) Rather than guessing how much will or won't break - would some please
just run this change (F/T in Prelude) over Hackage and do some analysis and
stats? Sure, it doesn't represent all code - but it's a good start.

2) That there are so many Prelude replacements... and that none of them are
worth it enough to induce people to add the two lines of code it takes to
use 'em.... tells me that they don't have enough value.

3) Stability is very important to adoption of a language. People are very
influenced by their first impressions of a system. We seem perilously close
to "death by continuous little paper cuts" here: I saw the catch debacle
snag tons of people and projects in tiny hiccups. If you were a newcomer to
Haskell (experienced engineer or no) and you ran into this, I bet it was a
turn off.

In generaly I'm against the constant evolution of Haskell. Revising the
language every year (or even every two), and revising the core libraries
and modules and Prelude piecemeal seem to me like recipes for avoiding
success. Now that functional programming is gaining some notice in the
wider engineering world, now would be the time to have the most stable,
most "always just works", most reliable language of the lot. That probably
means stability trumps warts. Not forever, but it means avoiding a constant
stream of hiccups.

I think we'd be better served by "chunking" this stuff up over several
years - and releasing it in well defined sets.

4) My reaction to the "monomorphism helps newbies" argument is always the
same: Well then, let's just fix the error messages!

- Mark
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