[Haskell-cafe] Backward compatibility

[Adrian May]

Hi Ertugrul,

> Well, it is a rant, so you can just as well concede it. =)

By my standards that was a lullaby ;-)

Everything you said is correct. Just like everything I said.

The best policy lies between the two extremes. Your extreme would be fine
if Haskell presented itself as a purely theoretical research tool. But it
actually wants people to use it for stuff that peoples' livelihoods depend
on.

So there are some shiny new frameworks out there which unlike WASH didn't
break yet. Thanks for the pointers. I tripped over blaze a moment ago (so
no I didn't stomp back to PHP after all) which mentions something called
Snap. I'll check out your other suggestions too.

But what about two years from now? Will they still be working by then or
will their developers have got just as sick of continually moving goalposts
as those of WASH evidently did? Or would I be taking on the job of
maintaining it myself? I guess you'll be telling me that Happstack is a bad
habit of mine and I should rewrite my whole system in whatever the new
thing is by then.

I mentioned this trade-off that you talk about towards the end of my
rantaby. It's true that we can't have the best of both worlds but perhaps a
little restraint would be appropriate. I mean, are you saying that Haskell
was really bad when it could make up its mind what "import Prelude" meant?
If you really want to change something that basic, how about calling the
new one Prelude2? I kinda liked Haskell even in 1998. I just don't see why
switching new things on has to mean switching old things off. You can't
have your cake and eat it, but I see no reason to shit all over one half of
the cake just because you're more interested in the other half.

Also, there's no real value in blaming these problems on the maintainers
for retaining the "bad habits" that they learned from Haskell. The reality
is that the forums are crammed with people suffering this kind of thing. It
doesn't make a difference who you blame. Either way, the ecosystem looks
untrustworthy, so fewer people will adopt it, and it'll be retreating from
its original stated goal, which IIRC was to be a standard and widely used
FL. It might be very rigorous and clever, but that's not much use if it's
only being used by the people who have a full time job making it even
cleverer.

Not a lot of people in industry are using Haskell. More are using Erlang,
Ocaml, XSL, J#, etc so it can't be just because they're scared of FP. If
you'd rather see more using Haskell, I strongly suggest you get a grip on
what real companies actually have to worry about. It ain't mathematical
rigour. Backward compatibility is a big chunk of it.

Adrian.
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