[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: Shorter Import Syntax

[Anthony Cowley]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 3:23 AM, Sven Panne <svenpanne at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can we please have a page on https://wiki.haskell.org/ describing the
> proposal (including its detailed semantics), the various counter-proposals
> (2? 3? I lost track to be honest), the various concerns/issues/...,
> pros/cons etc. ? Email threads are very bad for longer-running discussions,
> and even the trac ticket has already degenerated a bit into an email thread.
> I think by now it's very clear that more detailed discussion is needed, just
> counting some +1 and -1 doesn't lead us anywhere. (Language design by voting
> is often a terrible idea, BTW, this has been demonstrated by history many
> times...)

The original email I sent was not a design by committee, but a PSA
because when I started implementing this, I discovered that the parts
of GHC dealing with imports are in rather poor shape. The work needed
to shore that up touches half a dozen or so files, and I did not want
to finish the work to have the patch languish. Enough popular support
might have opened that door.

The PSA was greeted by authors writing strongly worded rebuttals
substantially longer than the four sentence proposal they obviously
did not read.

It received disdainful mockery based on a proprietary code base owned
by a company which itself is in the process of adding new syntax that
does not let us do anything we cannot do now.

We were told about how cabal works as a prelude to a quiet feature
request to actually make cabal work the way it was stated to work.

I simply do not have the desire to navigate that kind of cognitive
dissonance for a nights and weekends project, so I'm withdrawing the
proposal. If someone else wishes to continue via Wiki or otherwise,
that would be great.

Anthony