[Haskell-cafe] Re: (flawed?) benchmark : sort

[ajb at spamcop.net]

G'day all.

Quoting Conor McBride <conor at strictlypositive.org>:

> How depressing!

Sorry, I don't understand that.  Quotient types are good, but they're
not the whole story.  They just happen to be one use case with a
solid history behind them.

> it's just that
> we need to manage information hiding properly, which
> is perhaps not such a tall order.

It's my opinion (and I know I'm not alone in this) that modularity is
probably the one thing that Haskell really hasn't (yet) gotten right.
Haskell's implementation of modules/namespaces/whatever is the bare
minimum needed to be minimally useful.

It's a shame, because abstraction, in Haskell, is extremely cheap.  It's
often only one line, and you've got a compiler-checked abstraction that
can't be accidentally confused with its representation.  This should
encourage micro-abstractions everywhere, but without submodules,
namespaces or whatever you want to call them, these abstractions are
easy to break (on purpose, not by accident).

If only you could add a couple more lines of code, and instantly have
your abstraction unbreakable.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage