Reform of the Monad, and Disruptive Change

[Roman Leshchinskiy]

On 04/02/2011, at 10:49, Dark Lord wrote:

> I thoroughly agree with this. However, in the event that this does not happen, piecemeal fixes are better than none.

FWIW, I disagree. To put it bluntly, why is repeatedly breaking a lot of code better than not breaking it at all? Breaking a lot of code once might be ok because the benefits of fixing many issues probably outweigh the costs. But for each individual change (such as the Monad redesign), the costs far outweigh the benefits, IMO.

> (Seeing as the inertia in Haskell is such that Haskell 2011 was cancelled, and Haskell Platform 2011 contains no new packages, such a task force doesn't seem very likely.)

Introducing backwards-incompatible changes into a language standard *should* be hard.

Roman