[Haskell-cafe] Monad of no `return` Proposal (MRP): Moving `return` out of `Monad`

[Gregory Collins]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 8:09 AM, Gershom B <gershomb at gmail.com> wrote:

> My understanding of the argument here, which seems to make sense to me, is
> that the AMP already introduced a significant breaking change with regards
> to monads. Books and lecture notes have already not caught up to this, by
> and large. Hence, by introducing a further change, which _completes_ the
> general AMP project, then by the time books and lecture notes are all
> updated, they will be able to tell a much nicer story than the current one?


This is a multi-year, "boil the ocean"-style project, affecting literally
every Haskell user, and the end result after all of this labor is going to
be... a slightly spiffier bike shed?

Strongly -1 from me also. My experience over the last couple of years is
that every GHC release breaks my libraries in annoying ways that require
CPP to fix:

~/personal/src/snap λ  find . -name '*.hs' | xargs egrep
'#if.*(MIN_VERSION)|(GLASGOW_HASKELL)' | wc -l
64


As a user this is another bikeshedding change that is not going to benefit
me at all. Maintaining a Haskell library can be an exasperating exercise of
running on a treadmill to keep up with busywork caused by changes to the
core language and libraries. My feeling is starting to become that the
libraries committee is doing as much (if not more) to *cause* problems and
work for me than it is doing to improve the common infrastructure.

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