[ghc-steering-committee] Proposal #270: Support pun-free code. Recommendation: accept

[Chris Dornan]

I don’t think we should be in the business of overturning by fiat significant conventions that have been long established.

I am really quite concerned about people pointing to proposals accepted by a technical committee and expanding this into wide-ranging normative conventions to be imposed on the general Haskell community after the fact.

Accordingly I am flipping my recommendation. I now agree with Simon. Until we are satisfied that the wider consensus has been established — that these puns are no longer good style — I think we should *not* accept this proposal. The risks are too great and, as Simon points out, the potential benefits are not compelling.

Chris


> On 2022-08-24, at 11:49, Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> thanks for the summary.
> 
> Am Mittwoch, dem 24.08.2022 um 07:27 +0100 schrieb Chris Dornan:
>> To (avoiding) this end, I suggest that we include wording in the
>> user guide section documenting this extension to the effect that
>> there is no consensus on the desirability or otherwise of the punful
>> code the extension seeks to address.
> 
> I wonder if it isn’t really on us to address that and try to establish
> a consensus about where we want Haskell to evolve to? Should we not try
> to provide unifying guidance by choosing between
> 
>   puns are fine and good practice, the language evolution takes that into
>   account
> 
> and
> 
>   puns are discouraged and undesirable, as they do not work smoothly with
>   the Haskell we envision for the future,
>   we provide work-arounds (like this proposal) when dealing with code
>   that still has them
> 
> It seems that by accepting
> https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/378 we went down
> the second road, although the wording in that proposal, in section
> https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0378-dependent-type-design.rst#non-design-of-dependent-types
> is much more diplomatic than I was above.
> 
> Maybe the sentiment could be that puns are a bit like lazy IO: It used
> to be the thing to do so, it will continue to work, but they should no
> longer be considered current good practice.
> 
> Cheers,
> Joachim
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Joachim Breitner
>  mail at joachim-breitner.de
>  http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
> 
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