[ghc-steering-committee] Language Extension Policy – Round 2

[Richard Eisenberg]

> On Apr 28, 2023, at 7:20 AM, Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote:
> 
> I believe [the idea about using warnings] was Richard’s.

I indeed have been the one to advocate for this previously, and I still do.

I think the current system of extensions presents a bewildering array of complexity to users, and (I claim) a big source of why people say Haskell is so complicated. Haskell, at its core, is beautifully simple! But this fact easily gets lost. 

So my goal in advocating using warnings is to try to reduce the number of language extensions. We would then have one big language, but users have ways of subsetting if they like. In some sense, this is just about marketing (it doesn't change expressiveness) but marketing is important. It would be easy to interpret existing -X flags as warning twiddles, so the idea is backward compatible.

Richard
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