[Haskell-cafe] Backward compatibility

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

One of the great things about the Haskell mailing lists is the supportive, respectful tone that is the dominant mode of discourse.  I sense that things are getting a little out of control in this particular thread.  Even though this particular issue is clearly extremely frustrating for those involved, it would be great to turn down the emotional temperature.

I don’t know why Haskell folk tend to be so generous and helpful, but they really are. (Maybe it’s the hylomorphisms.)  Anyway, let’s keep it that way.

Simon

From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Gregory Collins
Sent: 03 May 2013 08:27
To: Adrian May
Cc: Haskell Cafe
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Backward compatibility

On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:48 AM, Adrian May <adrian.alexander.may at gmail.com<mailto:adrian.alexander.may at gmail.com>> wrote:
May I venture a guess that you never tried to manage a 5-10 million line project?

I build a project a couple orders of magnitude bigger than that dozens of times every day. Similar stories are not uncommon among people who inhabit this list. But thanks, citing that figure as an excuse to be condescending to that person was really worth a giggle this morning. :)


That's what I do. I'm not a programmer, I'm a manager. I run teams of a few dozen people on subprojects within huge telecom-related projects, and my job is to try and keep it all from collapsing in a heap of bugs.

If you had any experience of that you'd run a mile from any technology with this hit and miss attitude.

You keep saying things like this. Actually, you're in this situation because one or more people within your organization have made a succession of very bad choices. Haskell is not to blame. Personally, I almost can't believe you're taking this tack on the list now that the details of your situation are apparent: you've let a 5-10 million line project spiral out of control without putting the necessary software engineering infrastructure and controls in place.


I can't tell people what version they should be using because half of them work for a completely different company. They have their own dependencies coming from other projects that I'm not even allowed to know about.

... and the truth emerges. This issue you're having reflects a lot more strongly on your technical culture than it does on any instability in GHC.

Listen: someone within your organization decided to build a product based on a very old library which is no longer maintained by anyone. If this library were actually critical to your business, you would fork it and either get someone in-house or pay a contractor to fix bugs and keep it up to date. (And there are plenty of people here who might be interested in a contract gig to fix this for you if you asked).

Repeatedly claiming in the most histrionic terms that GHC ought to freeze forever and never deprecate anything again so that you can avoid doing your job properly is simply not realistic, especially given Haskell's social culture (newsflash: it's a research platform), and is not going to garner you any sympathy on this list, either. You could practically be the poster boy for why we have the motto "avoid success at all costs".

You have two options: stay on GHC 6.x (the bits didn't get deleted from the internet), and if that isn't practical, fix Wash (or pay someone to do it if you don't know how) and get on with your life.

G
--
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net<mailto:greg at gregorycollins.net>>
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