[Haskell-cafe] New type of ($) operator in GHC 8.0 is problematic

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 02/10/2016 06:30 PM, Joachim Durchholz wrote:

[--snip--]
> I am not sure how relevant that is going to be in practice. Maybe it's
> possible to come up with a short "for now" explanation that is
> consistent with what students will experience; if that's possible, I'd
> expect that to be much preferrable over a simplified/lying Prelude.
> 
> One thing about a simplified Prelude: It will profoundly unnerve
> newbies. The feeling of shifting ground the first time they see that
> something is amiss will make them feel insecure, because they won't know
> how much of what they already learned will have to be thrown overboard.

How do you know that they will feel this way?

I feel like most people in this thread are just going by assumptions.

(I guess I could be accused of the same thing, but I guess arguing for
the status quo doesn't really incur a burden of proof. We can see that
it at least works somewhat well. Granted the $ type is new, but advanced
type signatures abound in Haskell already. It's kind of par for the course.)

Regards,