[Haskell-cafe] statep haskell-lang [was: Re: Hoogle and Network.Socket]

[Achim Schneider]

"John A. De Goes" <john at n-brain.net> wrote:

> Partial functions and dependent typing do not seem to play well together,
> for instance.
>
Well, sure, they do, as long as you don't expect the typechecker to
terminate if some type it checks is formulated in unterminating code.
GHC already has this problem if you enable UndecidableInstances, which
is exactly the reason why you shouldn't enable it if you don't
understand the need to enable it in great detail and clarity.

I think that arguing that Haskell is _obsolete_ because it isn't yet
fully dependently typed is vastly mistaken. Right now there are only a
handful of dependently typed languages, Agda being the only one that
seems to be at least partly usable by people without a Ph.D in logic.

It is _especially_ still unknown how to properly tackle totality. Not
jumping on the bleeding-edge bandwagon does not imply that Haskell's
evolution grinded to a halt, but that it protects itself from possibly
fatal mistakes.

Maybe the first ____-calculus based languages will change the state of
the art and you will see the GHC devs fighting over who is going to
implement it, maybe they won't and they will be free to concentrate on
other, equally important, though vastly different, topics. Like
optimisations, toolchain support or finally outlawing tabs in source
code.


One thing is for sure: All progress will be stopped dead if the
community starts to listen to people who demand "enterprise-readiness".
I seriously doubt that backwards compatibility will ever be broken to
the point of non-inoperation, but I certainly expect -- and do, in some
sense, hope -- it to be broken, to the point where you can't mix H98
and H' source because they are mutually incompatible, either in syntax,
semantics, or both, as long as you can still comparably painlessly link
them.

If your business is fine with that, you shouldn't have any problems. I
can imagine a lot of companies currently using Haskell wouldn't be
happy with freezing Haskell, at all: They don't mind updating their
code to the state of the art.

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