[Haskell-cafe] Over general types are too easy to make.

[Chris Smith]

On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 9:40 AM,  <timothyhobbs at seznam.cz> wrote:
> The thing is, that one ALWAYS wants to create a union of types, and not
> merely an ad-hock list of data declarations.  So why does it take more code
> to do "the right thing(tm)" than to do "the wrong thing(r)"?

You've said this a few times, that you run into this constantly, or
even that everyone runs into this.  But I don't think that's the case.
 It's something that happens sometimes, yes, but if you're running
into this issue for every data type that you declare, that is
certainly NOT just normal in Haskell programming.  So in that sense,
many of the answers you've gotten - to use a GADT, in particular -
might be great advice in the small subset of cases where average
Haskell programmers want more complex constraints on types; but it's
certainly not a good idea to do to every data type in your
application.

I don't have the answer for you about why this always happens to you,
but it's clear that there's something there - perhaps a stylistic
issue, or a domain-specific pattern, or something... - that's causing
you to face this a lot more frequently than others do.  If I had to
take a guess, I'd say that you're breaking things down into fairly
complex monolithic parts, where a lot of Haskell programmers will have
a tendency to work with simpler types and break things down into
smaller pieces.  But... who knows... I haven't seen the many cases
where this has happened to you.

-- 
Chris