[haskell-cafe] Monad and kinds

[John Dorsey]

Tim Chevalier wrote:
> I'm no master, but I've never encountered a situation where strictness
> annotations would be useful as documentation, nor can I imagine one.
> That's because optimization *is* the only reason why programmers
> should care about strictness information. IMO, arguing that
> programmers should care at all amounts to conceding that default
> laziness is treacherous.

I'm no master either, but I'd argue that if we promise new programmers
that they don't need to care about strictness, we thereby ensure that
default laziness is treacherous.

A year or two ago, ISTR that *most* of the newbie-generated traffic in
the cafe was about atrocious performance of naive programs due to
strict/lazy concerns.  I think it was scaring people away.

Adding strictness can improve asymptotic space performance, as an example.
Is there a reason to think this won't always be true?  Honest question,
since I don't know nearly enough about strictness analysis to guess
how good it'll be some day.

Regards,
John