[ghc-steering-committee] Please review #220: QualifiedImports, Shepherd: Simon M

[Spiwack, Arnaud]

Dear all,

As one of the author of this proposal. I am, unsurprisingly, against
rejecting it. Though it seems I'm rather in a minority here, let me add one
last argument to try and sway the general opinion. Being understood that
being an author, this argument cannot, in any way be considered as “a vote”
or any such thing.

Human psychology is powerful. As it happens, we have a very strong tendency
to choose whatever course of thought or action requires the least mental
effort. Defaults require very little mental efforts, so we naturally will
gravitate towards default. This is why, for instance, almost every Swedish
worker is part of a union, while almost every French worker isn't: in
Sweden, unionising is opt-out, whereas in France, it's opt-in. That's also
why putting apples in front of sweet deserts in a school restaurant will
result in more children eating fruits rather than cakes.

Back to our case: the overwhelming majority of Haskell packages are
designed to be used unqualified (and also do almost all of their imports
unqualified). Now, either unqualified import are really that much better,
or the default has an enormous influence. As I previously mentioned, in
Ocaml, a fairly similar language, qualified is the default, and almost
every libraries are designed for qualified imports, and import their
modules qualified. So I'd wager it's the default.

As a software architect, I do actually spend a bunch of my code reviews
saying: you should import qualified. It would be a much more effective and
powerful message to simply set the default imports as being qualified in my
projects. For me, the change in this proposal would really be a very
significant change.

Now, the committee may decide that this is still not worth the confusion
implied by having two incompatible syntactic conventions out there. That's
entirely fair! I just don't want anybody to walk out of this conversation
with the feeling that this proposal is an inconsequential stylistic change.

/Arnaud

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 2:04 PM Sandy Maguire <sandy at sandymaguire.me> wrote:

> I'm happy with your reasoning, Simon, and am also in favor of rejection.
>
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 9:23 AM Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear steering committee -
>>
>> The discussion following my earlier suggestion to reject the proposal has
>> petered out. Taking into account the discussion, it still seems to me that
>> we should reject the proposal, so I've posted on the thread to this effect:
>> https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/220#issuecomment-531666589
>>
>> Any further comments before we close it?
>>
>> Thanks
>> Simon
>>
>> On Fri, 5 Jul 2019 at 08:19, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear steering committee -
>>>
>>> I am inclined to reject this proposal, so as per the new committee
>>> process I posted the rationale on the github thread:
>>> https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/220#issuecomment-508414602
>>>
>>> You may want to consider the proposal and offer opinions while we wait
>>> for the authors' rebuttal. It's a very simple proposal.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Simon
>>>
>>> On Wed, 3 Jul 2019 at 08:55, Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear Committee,
>>>>
>>>> this is your secretary speaking:
>>>>
>>>> QualifiedImports
>>>> has been proposed by Arnaud Spiwack and Guillaume Bouchard
>>>> https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/220
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/tweag/ghc-proposals/blob/qualified-import/proposals/0000-default-qualified-import.rst
>>>>
>>>> I propose Simon M as the shepherd.
>>>>
>>>> Please reach consensus as described in
>>>> https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals#committee-process
>>>> In particular, talk to the authors before, if you think this should be
>>>> rejected, and kick off the discussion on Github, following the steps
>>>> described under “Now the shepherd proposes to accept or reject the
>>>> proposal” in the above link.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Joachim
>>>> --
>>>> Joachim Breitner
>>>>   mail at joachim-breitner.de
>>>>   http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>
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>
>
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