[ghc-steering-committee] Proposal #608, -XPatternSignatureBinds. Rec: accept

[Arnaud Spiwack]

On Fri, 26 Jan 2024 at 21:14, Adam Gundry <adam at well-typed.com> wrote:

> I would argue that we should be willing to remove (mis)features from
> future GHC20xx editions, and that (the PatternSignatureBinds component
> of) ScopedTypeVariables is potentially such a misfeature.
>

I agree (in fact, I'd say that it's the whole point of language editions).
Hence my question :-) .

I don't, however, agree that we should make arguments on the grounds of the
swiss-army-knife philosophy (“make it possible to customise GHC to
everybody's desires”). I think that 2023 has been a convincing
demonstration that this philosophy hasn't served us well, and has been
counterproductive. Actually, I was under the impression that all the
discourse about basing our stability guarantees on language editions was a
definite adoption of the newer point of view. It does seem, though, that
we're not yet in complete agreement there.

I'm content to concede here, but you'll have noticed in my recent
interventions that I'm increasingly prudent about entropy-increasing
changes (I'm worried, I guess, about death by a thousand paper cuts). I'd
rather changes that we accept have a purpose. Does this one have a purpose?
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