[Haskell-cafe] an idea for modifiyng data/newtype syntax: use `::=` instead of `=`

[amindfv at gmail.com]

El Aug 8, 2015, a las 19:01, Hilco Wijbenga <hilco.wijbenga at gmail.com> escribió:

> On 8 August 2015 at 14:46, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 5:27 PM, Hilco Wijbenga <hilco.wijbenga at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> So when is it okay? :-) Still, if proper tooling automates it, why not?
>> 
>> Because your tooling does not rewire people's brains and does not
>> automatically run itself on other people's programs when you *look* at them.
> 
> I don't think we need to "rewire" our brains to accommodate a few
> language tweaks. The haskell-fix tool I had in mind would change the
> source code so you would look at the fixed code. But, yes, there would
> be a transition time. In my experience that is true for any change to
> your code base.
> 

An analogy: Haskell's use of "::" and ":" are backwards. Most ML-style languages use ":" for types but iiuc it was assumed using cons would be so common that it should be the quicker one to type. Obviously that estimation was wrong -- we write a lot more types than conses. Annoying? Yes. Way too late and fundamental to change? Also yes.

I also disagree with the better-ness (even for beginners) of the proposed changes, but point 1 supersedes that.

tom


>> Because not everyone builds houses of cards and leaves them to collapse on
>> their successor while they go chase the next cool thing, like certain modern
>> "web programmers" who seems to have confused "agile" with "fragile" and
>> therefore think Go rewriting its syntax every week is somehow sensible. And
>> not everyone *can* do things the
>> zero-memory-change-it-all-who-cares-it'll-all-be-different-next-week way;
>> that does not fly on the business end, for example. (I've had people claim
>> to me that they do that with accounting packages. I bet they've never faced
>> an audit and will be learning the hard way why business does not work that
>> way when the auditors *do* show up.)
> 
> You seem to be creating a whole mountain range out of a mole hill. :-)
> 
> I have to maintain a very low quality, legacy code base. So I totally
> sympathize with the "house of cards" and "fragile" part of your
> paragraph. But after that I have a hard time making sense of it.
> 
> Nobody is advocating changing Haskell to look like a completely
> different language. Or that we start making language changes every
> week. I really do not understand where you got that impression.
> Everybody is talking about tiny language tweaks that (hopefully) make
> the language better. If the agreement is that, yes, it does make the
> language better than the blanket counter argument "it breaks existing
> code" should not stop progress. If you don't make improvements now
> because of existing code then tomorrow there will be more existing
> code and thus even more inertia.
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe