[Haskell-cafe] ANN: text 0.5, a major revision of the Unicode text library

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy at n-heptane.com> wrote:

>
> What are the chances of seeing a, instance Data Text, some day?


I might as well follow up here, since I've sent Jeremy a couple of messages
on this subject.

I think maybe someone else will have to take a crack at a Data instance for
Text, because the documentation for Data.Data is not written in English. In
its syntax and structure, it closely hews to what we think of as English,
but it is the kind of documentation that can only be understood by someone
who already knows what it is going to say.

This is an exemplar of my experience with the cottage industry of generic
programming in Haskell: I'd really quite like to use the stuff, but for
goodness's sake, o beloved researchers, please aim your expository papers at
non-specialists once in a while. An endless chain of papers of the form "my
technique, which you won't understand, is better than this other technique,
which you haven't read about and won't anyway understand, in subtle ways
that you won't understand" does not feel to me like progress.

Yours in some misery and frustration,
Bryan.
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