[Haskell-cafe] Monad of no `return` Proposal (MRP): Moving `return` out of `Monad`

[Henrik Nilsson]

Hi,

Bardur Arantsson wrote:

 > This is an argument from FUD. If it's unquantifiable then it can
 > (almost by definition) neither count for nor against, can it?

Of course 25 years+ of legacy is there. Quantifiable or not.
And of course it must count if we wish Haskell to be taken
seriously and be increasingly successful. That is at least
the view of a significant part of the Haskell community.
And the way to account for it, both that which is quantifiable
and that which is not, is to make sure that fundamental
language changes are given due consideration in a forum
where all stakeholders are adequately represented.

 > Personally, I don't think there's much need to push the actual
 > *breaking* change through, but I *do* think that deprecation warnings
 > should go in as quickly as possible.

What would the point of that be unless MRP eventually will go through?
I am afraid it comes across as an attempt to preempt proper process.

I'm somewhat baffled, to say the least.

 > It seems to me that the community *is* being involved rather than
 > being, as you say, "involuntary field testers".

Well, there are many prominent people who I have not seen posting
here. There are others who only found out via facebook postings
and the like, alerted by people who like me feel this is not
a proper process for a breaking change. The fact that there now
is a discussion

 > As I've certainly mentioned in this thread, the previous committee
 > didn't actually accomplish very much [1].

Measuring "accomplishment" in terms of number of changes seems both
naive and worrying to me, I must say. Maybe the committee actually
accomplished a great deal by not breaking things unnecessarily, for example?

 > I also note that much of what they *did* get through was actually
 > mostly already field-tested in GHC beforehand.

But with only a couple of possible exceptions, those were not
breaking changes affecting pretty much every single user.

Best,

/Henrik

-- 
Henrik Nilsson
School of Computer Science
The University of Nottingham
nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk




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