[Haskell-cafe] MRP, 3-year-support-window, and the non-requirement of CPP

[Malcolm Wallace]

On 6 Oct 2015, at 17:47, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote:

> 
>> The problem by discussions is that they are done between two groups with
>> quite a difference in experience. On one hand you have people like Bryan,
>> who have considerable contributions to the Haskell ecosystem and much
>> experience in large scale software development (e.g. from Facebook). On the
>> other hand you have people who don't. That's okay. We've all been at the
>> latter group at some point of our career.
> [...]
> 
> At the risk of stating the obvious: I don't think it matters from which
> group a given argument comes from as its validity doesn't depend on the
> messenger. 

In that case, I think you are misunderstanding the relevance of Johan's argument here.  Let me try to phrase it differently.  Some people who can reasonably claim to have experience with million-line plus codebases are warning that this change is too disruptive, and makes maintenance harder than it ought to be.  On the other hand, of the people who say the change is not really disruptive, none of them have (yet?) made claims to have experience of the maintenance of extremely large-scale codebases.  The authority of the speaker does matter in technical arguments of this nature: people without the relevant experience are simply unqualified to make guesses about the impact. 

Regards,
    Malcolm