[Haskell-cafe] Foldable for (,)

[Gershom B]

On May 3, 2017 at 11:36:00 AM, Michael Orlitzky (michael at orlitzky.com) wrote:
> On 05/03/2017 04:44 AM, Chris Smith wrote:
> > I'm also interested in Jonathon's question, so let me try to bring
> > things back to the question. Everyone agrees that there's only one
> > reasonable way to define this instance if it exists. But the question
> > is: why is it defined at all?
> >
>  
> `const 42` is an equally-reasonable implementation to me. If the output
> is nonsense, who cares what particular nonsense it is?
>  
> These are all objectively stupid results:
>

> By analogy, ask the same question about, say, PHP.
>  
> Question: why is "foo" == TRUE in PHP?
> Answer: it makes perfect sense, once you understand blah blah herp derp.
>  
> No, it's stupid, and your reasoning is stupid if you can justify it.

We’ve had some discussions about civility lately. This is also about having a productive discussion as well, I think.

Comments like the above don’t meaningfully contribute to the discussion, and while they call “results” “objectively stupid” and not people, they tend to raise the temperature of a discussion in such a way that the latter seems only a few more flamewar posts away. I know people have deeply held opinions on things, but simply calling things “objectively stupid” repeatedly and loudly isn’t going to change any of those opinions.

We know it won’t do that, because it hasn’t done that for the last two (?) years already. What we know it does, after experiencing it for the past two-ish years, is just make everyone sick of the mailinglists and increasingly testy towards one another, which is an outcome I think nobody wants.

Can we stop with this, please?

—Gershom